Any examples?
Im thinking split the atom then decided homeopathy was neat, or UFO’s are real kind of thing, conspiracy theory, etc - or went into another field of research that they knew nothing about and made sweeping statements. I know its happened but seem to be having mental blocks at concrete examples.
Some points for guessing what sparked this off.
Otara
Nickolai Tesla
He was largely responsible AC current and radio. Then he went off on wireless power transmission and I think other kooky ideas.
Peter Duesberg and William Shockley come to mind, though their cases are not nearly as extreme as Tesla’s.
Some, perhaps many, will disagree. Still, I’d include Linus Pauling in such a group.
ETA: Well, maybe not “destroyed” his reputation, but certainly sullied it.
Dr Willaim McBride
The Australian doctor whose letter to the Lancet in 1961 first alerted the world to the dangers of the thalidomide drug, in 1993 was found guilty of scientific fraud, ‘deliberately selecting and culling data’ and of ‘reprehensible’ conduct in his experiments with another anti-morning sickness drug, Debendox.
I see by taking the time to look up the Wiki URLs I have been beaten to the punch on some of these.
There’s loads of examples of really exceptional scientists who decide to have a dig at another field late in their career and make a pigs arse of things. Pauling would be a good example - although it’s not right to say he ‘destroyed’ his reputation, he certainly watered it down with his studies on vitamin C [on preview KarlGauss beat me to it].
I’d say these sort of ventures are more damaging to great legacies in the mind of the (scientifically aware) public. I would guess that the man on the street who’s heard of Pauling will equate his name first to wacky theories concerning vitamin C, and will be less aware that he wrote ‘The Nature of the Chemical Bond’ - probably the most important work in chemistry in the last 100 years. As a result, all scientists (IME) still consider him a giant and regard his later excursions as just the intellectual doodling of a great mind.
It’s interesting that when a lot of these guys fall flat on their face, it’s easily ascribed to arrogantly over-reaching, or ‘went into another field of research that they knew nothing about and made sweeping statements’ from the OP. But it is precisely this intellectual fearlessness that underpins their great work in the first place. Pauling would be the poster boy for this - his seminal work in chemistry and biology was all about crossing discipilines and having the stones to tackle widely divergent problems. So it stands to reason that they’re going to fall on their aris sooner or later. In Pauling’s case, it looks a long, long way from the Schrodinger equation to clinical medicine and so it proved.
A particularly rich area for this sort of intellectual slapstick is evolution. It seems mandatory that any scientist with pretensions of grandeur has to take some sort of position on it. Fred Hoyle is a prominent example of an eminent scientist who talked a lot of bollox (AFAIK) in this area.
Then are also people who continue to do real work in their field of expertise, while doing crank work in another field at the same time.
The best example I can think of off the top of my head is Roger Penrose, who’s been doing real mathematical physics and writing great pop-physics at the same time, but also trying to convince everyone that the microtubules in our brain must form a quantum computer because human mathematicians have some form of direct access to mathematical truth.
But I know there are far better ones that are eluding my memory.
Kerry Mullis as well. He won the Nobel prize for developing PCR, one of the techniques that makes modern biology possible. I think he’s always been a bit crazy, but now he’s got a platform, so he can say all the stupid things he wants about AIDS or climate change denialism.
I wouldn’t put Watson on this list, though. He always had a reputation for shooting off his mouth and being a world class asshole, even before he won the Nobel.
It is important, and interesting that most of these guys didn’t really destroy their reputations. We list them because they are still revered.
McBride however is a good example of really messing up. But he didn’t do it by going off into some whack job ideas, his was just staying in the area and doing bad things. Really just trying to reproduce his first success. He wouldn’t be the first person to do that.
Personally I think Fred Hoyle is one of the most clear travesties of the Nobel committee. He richly deserved the prize for nucleogenesis. But sticking to his guns with the steady state theory was enough to kill his chances. He didn’t mess up after doing good things, he stuck to his guns, and should be admired for that.
Penrose is interesting. It isn’t physicists who dislike him, his real work stands on its own, but computer scientists and many philosophers find his attempts at proving his immortality (which seems to be the subtext) remarkably shallow and annoying. OTOH he is a smart and basically nice guy.
Other guys that killed off otherwise solid science reputations include Fleischmann and Pons.
Shedrake seems to have reaped what he has sown:
. You’d expect some resistance to unorthodox theories, but getting stabbed in a lecture is a bit OTT.
It may not be an exact answer to the OP, but Isaac Newton was heavily into occultic/magickal practices and research for most of his life, side by side with his scientific and mathematical work.
That is a pretty misleading way of putting it. He spent a lot of time researching alchemy (and theology, and Bible based history). It may be considered pseudoscience now, but, given the poor state of actual chemical knowledge in Newton’s time, it was by no means obviously nonsensical then. Furthermore, the alchemical tradition had accumulated a lot genuine chemical facts (admitted along with a lot of nonsense) and developed many useful laboratory techniques. It did lay the groundwork for modern chemistry, and Newton played a significant role in the transition from alchemy to chemistry. It is not clear to what extent he bought-in to the mystical and magical side of alchemy, but even if he swallowed it whole (which is unlikely) his alchemical studies genuinely helped to advance chemistry. (They may have contributed to his physics too: It has been speculated that the idea of gravitational force grew out of the appreciation of chemical affinities that he gained from his alchemical studies, and interpreted in terms of attractions and repulsions between particles of matter.)
If we are going to disparage scientists of the past for holding ideas that we no longer consider scientific, we are going to have to say that just about every scientist before the mid-twentieth century was a loon.
Anyway, the fact that Newton had some less scientific interests damaged his reputation not at all in his own time, and (quite rightly) has scarcely affected it even today.
The problem here seems to have come not so much from resisting an unorthodox theory, but from accepting it.
I’ll nominate Eric Laithwaite purely because my father was actually at the lecture mentioned in the Wiki article.
Fritz Haber didn’t destroy his reputation with wacky research or woo-woo theories. He achieved infamy by being very effective. He was first hailed for his work on synthesizing ammonia which made modern fertilizers and explosives possible. But later he became (in)famous as the father of chemical warfare.
Alfred Russell Wallace pretty much went off the deep end after nearly scooping Darwin on natural selection. (Note I didn’t say evolution; that was an old idea, held by, among others, Erasmus Darwin. Natural selection operating on natural variation was the key.)
Roger Penrose is a peculiar case. He made a mathematical claim with no basis in fact or theory. When this was pointed out in print (by me, among others) he absolutely refused to accept the refutation. To a mathematician, this is utterly bizarre.
Hoyle’s case is also interesting. The last time I heard him lecture, he had come up with a theory (that mass was increasing with time) that allowed a steady state universe with no big bang. He claimed that from a mathematical point of view, the two theories made the same predictions. Instead of the big bang, it all went back to a time of 0 mass. But my take was, in case it really was equivalent, why bother? I suppose he could have answered that it eliminates the singularity. He was also a fervent advocate of the panspermia theory. Whatever evidence there was, it still leaves the basic question unanswered: how did life get going?
But in a larger sense, a great scientist cannot destroy his reputation. When people talk of Newton today, they concentrate on calculus and gravity and the alchemy is forgotten. The same will true of all the others mentioned here.
Freeman Dyson?
Pascual Jordan probably gets less credit then he deserves for early quantum work due to his unabashed embrace of Nazism.