One I remember thumbing through at the local used book store when I was in college was “Repeal Kepler’s Laws”. It reminded me of a physics text book, except there’s maybe five equations in the entire book (you might have to be a physics, math, or engineering major to appreciate that, though). It’s probably not worth the $80 that this store wants for it, but California State Polytechnic at Pomona’s library has it available for checkout. They have an apparent sequel, too, called “Reshape Newton’s Laws”
I’ve got a book entitled Polywater (by Franks?) on the whole polywater imbroglio.
Prometheus Press sublishes a lot of Skeptical books on pseudoscience, but I don’t think that’s the kind of thing you’re looking for.
Look up Robert W. Wood’s investigations of Blondlot’s “N-rays”. There ought to be sites on the internet about it. Blondlot honestly believed that he had found a new type of radiation, and the formidable Dr. Wood demolished his findings in a single article.
Pretty much all of Stephen J. Gould’s books of essays have historical essays about ideas that were once taken seriously, but didn’t prevail. He often has recourse to the line about “A beautiful theory, killed by an ugly fact.”
That’ll be Polywater (MIT, 1981) by Felix Franks. Certainly worth reading, but polywater was always far too controversial to ever qualify as a “paradigm”, at least in any Kuhnian sense.
The odd, invariably overlooked footnote to this affair is that Wood later became one of the dogmatic hold-outs who refused to believe any of the evidence for quantum mechanics.
failed paradigms of science? The closest I’ve seen is a book on historical science controversies. Phlogiston, etc., didn’t just fade away, instead there was a fight between the “old guard” and the upcoming revolutionaries.
Great Feuds In Science
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471169803/
Great Feuds In Medicine
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471347574
On a very similar topic: those discoveries that were “known” to be wrong; that were ridiculed and ignored, but later were vindicated as revolutionary advances:
Hidden Histories of Science
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0940322056/
The Art of Scientific Investigation (in the “resistance to new ideas” section)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0394701291/
At the Fringes of Science
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0813390605/
links:
The plight of the obscure innovator in science:
http://www.is.wayne.edu/mnissani/pagepub/history.htm
There are the books Nine Crazy Ideas in Science and Eight Preposterous Propositions, both by Robert Ehrlich. They are about ideas that aren’t nut theories but aren’t currently generally accepted in science. These are theories that can’t quite be proved true or false but are plausible enough to be advocated by some scientists. Ehrlich evaluates each of the theories and gives his guess as to how likely it is that each will someday be proved.
Stephen Jay Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man” is a book describing how often unconscious racism tainted scientific studies over the last hundred years or so. The book very directly addresses how scientific method got done in by very unscientific prejudices.
Also, Gould’s book “Wonderful Life” is fundamentally about how the Precambrian fossils in the Burgess Shales were initially misinterpreted by a leading scholar of the day, and languished unappreciated until a subsequent team of scolars actually looked at them for what they were and realized they were much odder creatures than had previously been recognized.
Kicking the Sacred Cow, James P Hogan.
I haven’t read this one, so I’m not sure which category it’d fit under. It’s a Baen book, so you should be able to read at least some of it online for free and buy the whole thing in electronic version at Baen.com or Webscriptions.net, if you’re interested. I think it mostly deals with current controversies rather than older ones.
DancingFool