<i>When did those ideas become widespread?</i><p>I honestly don&#x27;t know.  I&#x27;d always assumed that all of that happened well before I was born, but never bothered looking for any exact dates.  It&#x27;s just something I&#x27;ve always been exposed to, and have always taken the importance of falsification as a given.<p>A quick search turns up this[1] from Wikipedia:<p>&quot;In work beginning in the 1930s, Popper gave falsifiability a renewed emphasis as a criterion of empirical statements in science.&quot;<p>OTOH, the entry on Popper at Plato[2] says this:<p>&quot;However, in the 1970&#x27;s a series of papers published by researchers such as Miller, Tichý, and Grünbaum in particular revealed fundamental defects in Popper&#x27;s formal definitions of verisimilitude.&quot;<p>which suggest that his work had achieved enough signficance by the 1970&#x27;s that other people were basing work on it (and in this case, perhaps refuting bits of it).<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Falsifiability" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Falsifiability</a><p>[2]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;plato.stanford.edu&#x2F;entries&#x2F;popper&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;plato.stanford.edu&#x2F;entries&#x2F;popper&#x2F;</a>