The classical example of a successful research programme is Newton's gravitational theory: possibly the most successful research programme ever.

It would be wrong to assume that one must stay with a research programme until it has exhausted all its heuristic power, that one must not introduce a rival programme before everybody agrees that the point of degeneration has probably been reached.

The positive heuristic of the programme saves the scientist from becoming confused by the ocean of anomalies.

There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory.

Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.

Indeed, this epistemological theory of the relation between theory and experiment differs sharply from the epistemological theory of naive falsificationism.