40 years ago a single experiment upset a decade of painstaking research on the mechanisms of rhythm generation in the heart. It did so by turning a theory of pacemaker activity upside down. Instead of attributing rhythm to decaying potassium current carrying outward current, it attributed the pacemaker depolarization to the slow activation of a channel conducting sodium ions into cardiac cells. But this was no standard upset of a theory. Like the replacement of Newtonian mechanics by relativity theory, the new theory explained every minute detail of the experimental observations that had established the theory it was replacing. Computational modelling of the heart achieved one of the major successes, the complete mapping of one theory onto another without challenging the correctness of any of the experimental findings. This review details the way in which this transition occurred and draws some important lessons for modelling of biological processes today.

40 年前，一项实验颠覆了十年来对心脏节律产生机制的艰苦研究。它通过颠倒起搏器活动理论来做到这一点。它没有将节律归因于携带向外电流的衰减钾电流，而是将起搏器去极化归因于将钠离子传导到体内的通道的缓慢激活。心肌细胞。但这并不是对理论的标准颠覆。就像用相对论取代牛顿力学一样，新理论解释了实验观察的每一个细节，这些实验已经确立了它所取代的理论。心脏的计算建模取得了重大成功之一，即在不挑战任何实验结果的正确性的情况下将一种理论完全映射到另一种理论。这篇综述详细介绍了这种转变发生的方式，并为今天的生物过程建模提供了一些重要的经验教训。