Several mathematicians spent their adult lives calculating Pi. Ludolph van Ceulen took it to 35 decimal places and even had the number engraved on his tombstone. Zacharias Dase extended the precision to 200 decimals.
Then we come to poor Willie. Every morning he got up and calculated digits of Pi and then spent the afternoon checking his work. His error occurred at 527 decimal places and from that point forward his work was wrong. How many decades of work was that? Since the first 200 decimals were already known, Willie added 327 more places of precision before his error. As Homer Simpson would say… D’Oh!
Has there been other Academic D’Oh! moments in the Sciences?
There’s a possibility that, like Wakefield, they got precisely what they were after.
I think a good case could be made for Newton and all the time he wasted on alchemy and other mystical nonsense. Not because it invalidates his other work, but because it likely prevented him from improving on his work and generally distracted his attentions away from the fields that weren’t complete nonsense.
Then there’s Trofim Lysenko. Hailed as a Soviet peasant genius, it’s difficult to determine how much of his work was honest mistakes and how much was deliberately fraudulent. Nevertheless, he did set a standard for politicalization of psuedo-science which is still in use by climate change deniers and creationists.
SS
I hope these are flukes, and don’t negate the whole idea of resveratrol’s benefit. My biggest problem is deciding on which brand is most likely to be legit (real pills with real resveratrol).
I’d also think that the theory of ulcers qualifies. For years, anyone suffering from one was told to ‘cut back on the stress’. Sometime recently (well, in my lifetime), it was confirmed to be caused by *heliobacter pylori *bacteria, treated with antibiotics.