I was (re)reading The Science of Discworld (not bad, but the non-Pratchett authors aren’t nearly as cutsie as they think they are) when I started thinking about phlostigon and thought “That’s such a kewl idea…granted it’s wrong, but it’s still cool.”
Ditto with Ether, the Ptolmeic(sp) construction of the solar system, bodily humours and so on.
Are there any books (that aren’t creationist-based or anti-science) that give some depth on failed paradigms of science, why/how they came about and what replaced them?
Try Martin Garnder’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. He discusses pseudoscientific beliefs at length, and the chapter on proto-Scientology (the book was first published in 1955, when Hubbard was primarily using the term “dianetics”) is a hoot in and of itself.
That probably isn’t quite what you’re looking for, though.
Pretty much any good history of science account ought to give you a good understanding of the losers in any particular debate.
Just to take the Ptolemaic system, Liba Taub’s Ptolemy’s Universe (Open Court, 1993) is an exposition of the logic of the opening chapters of the Almagest. Though a more classic example of explaining medieval thinking on Ptolemy would be Duhem’s To Save the Phenomena (1908).
A magnificent example of a sympathetic portrait of a believer in the ether etc., faced in 1918 with the triumph of modern physics, is Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist (1982) by Russell McCormmach. Technically a novel, but McCormmach is a notable historian of the period and everything is footnoted in detail, so it works as a substantial insight into how the losers proabably reacted.
x-ray vision–at first glance, it seemed great but I dunno. Have you read it?
I’m asking because it seems to be a creationist (and pseudo-science) book. The author (in the on-line pages on Amazon) is unhappy that kids learn about silly notions like “gravity” before they learn about God. One of the chapters (about notions he’s going to debunk) is “The Earth Is Billions of Years Old”.
On (I presume) the author’s website, he’s pretty unhappy that so many people believe that the Michaelson-Morley experiment proved anything, that people don’t realize that the two-slit experiment has a simple mechanical explaination that doesn’t involve all that silly quantum, and he doesn’t understand why redshift happens, since there’s no medium in space to cause a wave to shift.
I may get this anyway though…I love pseudoscience.
Everyone else, please keep the suggestions coming. Mike’s recommendation only goes as far back as the turn of the (last) century and I’m more interested in the older stuff.
Again, maybe not exactly what you’re looking for, but lots of fun and great quotes:
“The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation” by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky.
Oh no prob at all and I appreciate the recommendation and the effort it took to look. I though it looked great, and I still do…for a completely different reason (I love kook-books! )
I know it’s not quite what you’re looking for, but I think you’d enjoy Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, by Galileo Galilei. (Also available online here (but not with the same extensive notes - nor foreword by Albert Einstein).)
It’s the book that formed the starting point of modern science, and although a lot of it has been proved wrong, the writing is classic! (For example, he thought that the tides were caused by water sloshing around caused by the rotation of the earth. - And argues very well for it!)
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Fenris, one of the best science courses I took in college was Historical Geology as it tracked the development of the science and examined all the blind alleys the discipline ran up during it’s relatively short evolution. Lamarck v. Haeckel and/or Mendel, Wegner’s ideas taking long to take root - it’s fascinating. Try a Historical Geology textbook. Thirty or so years ago I used Evolution of the Earth by Dott and Batten.
I can’t cite a book, but another “failed paradigm” you could look up is the impetus theory of movement, which held that objects move when they have a “charge” of motive force that gradually leaks away until they stop. Replaced by Newtonian mechanics.
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