I was reading the post Time Travel-Actual incident?. The point was made that given the choice between believing that two old women had traveled in time, or presuming that they’re frauds or senile, the latter was probably the case, as extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. This got me to thinking (always dangerous):
Given humanity’s tendency to error, confusion, and bullshit, there will always be a certain level of “background noise” to reports of unusual or remarkable occurrences. Especially when reporting phenomena that can’t be reproduced on demand. So conceivably there could be extremely rare occurrences that simply are below the radar screen.
So what currently is the least plausible thing that has been shown to be true? The old example of meteorites comes to mind: In the 18th century, farmers would report that they’d seen rocks falling out of the sky, and learned men would shake their heads and jibe about superstitious peasants.
Depending on how you look at it, most anything that man thought impossible was done years later. Sailing across oceans, Flight, Proving the Earth rotated around the sun, proving the earth was round, Spaceflight was possible and reasonably practical, Life on Mars (well, it’s still in debate, but the debates gotten heated again) we’d be able to get pictures of distant planets back here on earth in good/great detail…
I haven’t actually read about the incident that everyone’s talking about. I do recall reading in one book, that said time travel had to be possible, since some guy allegedly found a modern sandal print next to a T Rex footprint. Both were aged from the same era.
Maybe there are events that fall under the collecive radar because of “interference”. Then again, the bermudia triangle is pretty much false.
Actually, Saint Zero, it’s more the other way around: Anything that we’ve ever done was at one time thought impossible. This is an important distinction: Years ago, it was widely believed to be impossible to resore a rotted corpse to life. Today, however, it’s still impossible.
Back on-topic: After a thing is verified to be true, there’s always some explanation after the fact, by which it makes sense and is perfectly plausible. What you’re asking, I think, is things that would have been considered implausible before the fact. In that case, it’s probably a toss-up between the Special Theory of Relativity or Quantum Mechanics.
I think I understand what Lumpy is asking. Let’s say that tomorrow news breaks that a hunter in Washington state shot a bigfoot and dragged it back to town for everyone to see. It is now a indisputable fact that they exist. Such an event would send shockwaves through the scientific community and humiliate many mainstream zoologists. Would this be the kind of event you’re talking about? A phenomena that all the educated people said didn’t occur or was fake, but it was later shown that, sure enough, it did occur?
“In an infinite universe even the impossible becomes possible.” (I cannot remember who said that…sorry)
Still, think about it a moment. Events that might have an arbitrarily large number applied against their happening are probably happening somewhere in the Universe. Unless you get wacky very few things can be assigned a definitive probability of zero. Usually the probability is more like 0.000000000000000000000000000001 which, in practical daya-to-day life, is generally safe to equate to zero.
Example:
I believe quantum teleportation is a real and verifiable (in a lab) aspect of this universe. It is possible that you (all of your atoms) could blink out of existence and pop back into existence on, say, Mars. I got that example from something Stephen Hawking wrote and IIRC you would have to wait several times longer than the life of the entire universe to see this happen. The probability of it happening is vanishingly small but NOT ZERO.
So, in an infinite universe, one can make the case that this quantum teleportation is happening constantly. However, when one bug-eyed-monster (BEM) watches another BEM wink out of existence he may be puzzled because the chances of him, specifically, witnessing such an event again (so he can record and measure it) is insanely small (but again still not zero).
Unfortunately for our BEM friend the BEM villagers will figure he just pushed the second BEM over a cliff because they will never believe he just ‘vanished’. The first BEM will probably get strung-up by his eyestalks for killing his friend…he’ll never be able to prove otherwise.
At a guess I’d go with Chronos and Quantum Mechanics.
Otherwise I’d say you have to go back to things like the earth is round and the earth orbits the sun (not the other way around) to really find something where EVERYONE (at some point) was wrong till a few people figured the right of it.
Oh yeah…that and the fact that bands like N-Synch and Backstreet Boys can be considered music and allowed to exist.
