My husband went to a good college and was taught that plate tectonics was a new “theory” that had yet to be proven and was considered “newfangled” by the older professors, of course, who are now dead wrong, literally and figuratively speaking.
What other scientific facts were found to be dead wrong, through time, when new information was discovered.
Rocks occasionally come from space, although I thought the resistance lasted longer than the wikipedia-article indicates:
I’m not sure I would say anything is ‘dead wrong’ in science. Theories are explanations - they are generally supported by evidence. So, yes, the theory can be mistaken - ie, not take account of all the evidence or a broader theory can do a better job of explaining things. I’m not sure I’m explaining myself properly, so I’ll defer you to Asimov’s relativity of wrong…
This doesn’t seem to make sense. If your husband went to college in the 1950’s or 1960’s, back then plate tectonics WAS a comparatively new theory and WAS yet to be conclusively verified by experimental evidence. (No scientific theory is ever conclusively proven the way mathematical theorems are, but they can be falsified or confirmed by the results of experiments.)
After all, even the initial hypothesis of continental drift didn’t show up until 1915, and it took a good few years after that to establish a physical model for it that enabled plate tectonics to be considered a scientific theory.
So no, at that time your husband’s professors WEREN’T “dead wrong” about plate tectonics, either literally or figuratively. They were simply operating in an earlier era of scientific knowledge as far as geology is concerned.
Now, if your husband was hearing this stuff in college in, say, the 1980’s or 1990’s, then his professors would indeed have been dead wrong to claim that plate tectonics was a new or unverified theory. But if he did indeed attend a “good college”, then I rather doubt that he would have been taught any such claims at that late date.
Is there such a thing? Sure, there are universities with excellent physics departments. But are there any over-all “good colleges”?
And as for other hypotheses widely regarded as “scientific fact” in their day and later discredited, their name is legion. A few examples:
The earth is an immobile body at the center of the universe, and the sun and all other celestial objects revolve around it.
There are four elemental substances in the part of the universe extending from the center of the earth up to the orbit of the moon, namely earth, air, fire and water, whose behavior is determined partly by the existence of a preferred direction in space. Earth and water have a natural tendency to go “down”, i.e., towards the earth’s center, while fire and air naturally go “up”, i.e., away from it.
The chronology of the origins of the universe, the earth, and the human species is described with reasonable accuracy by accounts recorded in the Bible.
Humans are biologically set apart from animals and do not share any common genetic ancestor with them.
Light travels with infinite speed.
Objects are visible by means of rays of vision emanating from the eye.
I could go on for pages and pages. Basically, pretty much everything that we call “scientific fact” today is a replacement or correction of an earlier hypothesis that was viewed as “scientific fact” in its own day.
Hey, he graduated from college in 1975 and plate tectonics was considered “newfangled”. He’s gonna try to dig up his old geology textbook. He took the course in 1975. It took a long time for submarines to prove the mid-Atlantic ridge was moving, which was a few years later than that.
The thing is, it’s a good thing when the scientific consensus changes. When ideas about the nature of disease, or plate movement, or cosmology change in response to replicable observations or experiements - well, that’s the scientific method at work. That’s how we advance our knowledge the world, which translates into cures for disease, aircraft, computers, and on and on and on. There’s no shame in being proven “wrong” as a scientist, so long as your erroneous position was well-supported by the evidence up until the point that new evidence trumped it.
Well, except that people making those things you listed wouldn’t really be familiar with the concept of science as we understand it. They were not subjected to falsibiable tests for example. They may have been supposed facts, and even facts about the natural world, but it is not accurate to describe them as scientific, because they were not arrived at using the scientific method.
I don’t think “scientific fact” is really a correct term, is it? Shouldn’t we use a term like “accepted scientific theory”?
In any case, I don’t think any of those things met the criteria that we use today to decide that something is an accepted scientific theory.
I think a better example of what you’re looking for would be Newtonian Physics. It was based on observation and experimentation, and it was falsifiable in that predictions could be made and tested. So it met the criteria to be an accepted theory and yet, it turned out to be… not exactly wrong, but not totally right either.
Not very surprising, seeing that it was seismographic and paleomagnetic studies in the 1960’s that conclusively verified the movement of the lithosphere.
As that linked essay concludes:
I don’t see anything particularly “wrong” or unscientific about a college course in 1975 considering a theory that became established in the 1960’s as “new”.
After all, to take a more recent example, scientific theories and models relating to anthropogenic global warming emerged back in the 1970’s and 1980’s (following an original hypothesis proposed nearly a century earlier). But there are still many people who would describe these ideas as “new”.
There is a considerable “lag” time between when theories are discovered, “proven” and reach acceptance and with the time that textbooks are printed. There are loads of textbooks that are way behind in keeping up with theories and such, I would imagine, especially in the 1970’s before PC’s were being used by students.
I think there were lots of outdated information being disseminated back then.
Many of them were; for example, theories about the geocentric configurations of planetary orbits were refined by observational testing.
Now, if your point is that none of them were subjected to enough falsifiable testing to reveal the fundamental fallacy in their hypothesis, then I’d definitely agree with you.
However, that disqualification would also apply for, e.g., the first couple hundred years of the acceptance of davidm’s example of Newtonian classical mechanics. And if you’re going to claim that Newtonian physics wasn’t “arrived at using the scientific method”, then I think that makes the concept of “scientific method” pretty much meaningless.
All of the examples I gave (with the possible exception of the inference from the Bible) were deduced to some extent from empirical evidence and tested to some extent against experimental criteria. I can’t agree with you that there’s some kind of sharp binary division at any point in history between “scientific method” and “absence of scientific method”.
The methods of empirical deduction and experimental testing that we think of as the “scientific method” today have almost always played some part in constructing claims about the natural world that were viewed as fact. They just weren’t always applied with the same consistency or rigor that we now consider mandatory (and in fact, they are not always applied with that level of consistency or rigor even nowadays).
I’m not sure if there’s such thing as a “scientific fact”. Hypotheses and theories are always subject to revision if new evidence emerges to challenge it. Observations are prone to errors.
Sure. Textbooks for students, especially introductory textbooks, have traditionally tended to favor the well-established aspects of their subjects and don’t get much into the cutting-edge controversies of current research.
That may be changing somewhat nowadays, especially with new editions of standard textbooks being issued so frequently, but there will always be some difference between “textbook science” and “research article science”.
It’s hard to imagine, but before computers, you really were limited in what you could figure out, check, learn, discern. You had to get to a library, hope that there were recent editions of textbooks, etc. Hope that reference materials were up-to-date and available for your perusal.
Imagine not being able to turn on your computer and look up "plate tectonics?’ It was a different world then for learning and everything else.
The mid-70’s were tough times to be trying to teach a Geo 101 type class. You were at a point in the “tectonics revolution” where the evidence for tectonics had become overwhelming, but before the full implications of the theory had been applied to every facet of the science. So a lot of the geosyncline-based geological processes were being thrown out but the tectonics-based replacements weren’t fully fleshed out yet.
This sort of thing is hard to explain to a bunch of bored kids who just need a science class to graduate, so until the field really got comfortable with tectonics in the 80’s they generally stuck with teaching the older ideas (or just not teaching some things), with tectonics perhaps being a footnote.
When I started the equivalent of a US high school (in 1966) the Swedish school system was undergoing a major change in curriculum and all text books were brand new and filled with the latest ideas. This means that many things I had been told earlier, e.g. how mountain ridges were formed, were now null and void and new things, such as plate tectonics, were taught as gospel instead by the same teachers.
In the sense of less immediate availability of information, sure. In the sense of less immediate reliability of information, I’m not so sure.
Yes, you can Google “plate tectonics” today and find lots of reliable information on it; but then, as you noted, plate tectonics is no longer a new theory and is not particularly controversial. If you try Googling a newer and more controversial hypothesis, such as anthropogenic climate change, the quality of the resulting information will be far more mixed. Heck, if it’s controversial it doesn’t even have to be new in order to generate a lot of garbage results for a broad-based information search, as we can see by Googling a topic like “Darwinian evolution”.
True, we have much readier access to good information nowadays about the current state of science than we did back in 1975, but we also have much readier access to nonsense and lies about it.
Good article thanks.