I’m afraid I’m on vacation and don’t have links handy, but the ongoing project is called The Replication Initiative. Russ Roberts did an EconTalk podcast with the fellow running the project; the podcast went quite in depth about how they evaluated the projects.
<ajar> Mt St Helens revolutionized volcanology. </ajar>
One example that’s reasonably close is the story of Thomas Herndon. The gist of it is that he was a graduate student tasked with replicating the results of an economics paper. No matter how he punched the numbers into Excel, he couldn’t replicate the results. He asked the original authors of the paper for help and they sent him their data and Excel files. He discovered that they had a ton of calculation errors and the discovered effect didn’t exist at all.
Instead of saying, “Great Scott! You’re right” the originals authors announced that they stand by their results, despite it being 100% baseless. Academia!
Another case of “student mentions something revelatory” but with no “great scott! you’re right” moment was the unveiling of the Mpemba effect, and that misses the mark because:
– It was based on Mpemba’s original research rather than an insight into what the teacher was discussing on the blackboard, and
– Most of the audience ridiculed him, except the visiting professor who, like others have said, didn’t go “WOW, this changes EVERYTHING” but went back to the lab to replicate the results, and
– It’s not that important a discovery anyway.
Yes, prior to that we believed mountains would never dare to kill anyone named Harry Truman.
Real science doesn’t respect the hero tropes we expect from fiction. Breakthroughs are rarely accomplished by one person working against universal disdain, but by groups of people working in a field with a range of opinion about what they’re trying to accomplish, with each person playing a fairly minor role in the whole process: What they’re doing is important, but they could be replaced if they got hit by a bus tomorrow.
When I was in 7th grade our science teacher said all rivers flow north to south.
I wish now I could go back and show him he was wrong and given examples like the Nile.
Heck, I’ve seen people right here in the Cleveland area claim that one, even though all of the rivers around here flow south to north.
I worked with a teacher back in 1990 who said the same thing and I showed him the Nile on a map yet he still didnt believe it. He said the map was wrong.
Funny both teachers graduated from the University of Missouri.
Academia may be political, but politics are much more political. Herndon pointed out the errors in not just any paper but one that political leaders the world over used as justification for economic policy of a particular bent. Moreover, the paper wasn’t published in a peer-reviewed journal (else the raw data would have been examined and the errors found before acceptance) but by a think tank. And a lot of other economists already didn’t agree with the conclusions because they couldn’t get the data to work the same way…because they did their calculations the right way.
This is not the type of situation the OP was describing. Teachers/professors make mistakes and get confused all the time.
The scenario is a student points out an error during a lecture that changed a fundamental concept of the discipline.
While conceivable, it is extremely unlikely that has happened anytime recently or would ever happen. This is due to several reasons:
Fundamental concepts of the discipline have been checked by many people over years. The idea that a student could suddenly – essentially spontaneously – spot a fundamental, conceptual error during a lecture that had eluded all of science for decades is highly unlikely. If he is that brilliant why is he even a student? If he can reliably within seconds grasp errors in disciplines that scientists have labored over for decades, he would be a national asset, sequestered away in a think tank.
In the OP’s scenario, the student is not raising a previously known, previously researched objection to a fundamental concept of the discipline. The professor does not respond: “Yes, others have raised this issue but it is still not accepted”. It is a spontaneous, sudden insight of the student, which the professor immediately grasps is correct and everybody else has been wrong. That is not how things generally work in the real world.
Here is an example: a British mathematician was just credited in proving Fermat’s Last Theorem, which had eluded mathematicians for 350 years. Yet he actually solved it in 1993, but it took until now to be checked, verified and accepted:
If he raised this as a young student in a classroom lecture (and maybe he did), how could the instructor within moments grasp it sufficiently to say “Great Scott, you’re right!”
The nature of most fundamental concepts in most disciplines is they are not amenable to overturning in one stated sentence. Even if the new idea is valid, it’s impossible to be certain without extensive cross checking and validation. This typically requires much time and work. Thus the scenario in which a student raises an issue which (1) overturns a fundamental concept of a discipline and (2) it is confidently realized and accepted within the span of a few seconds – is virtually impossible. If it can be realized and accepted that fast, how come nobody did it before?
OTOH if it does overturn a fundamental concept of a discipline, but takes more time to check, this doesn’t fit within the stated classroom scenario.
Sometimes young prodigies can have conceptual leaps which overturns or fundamentally expands an established discipline. However this does not take place within a few seconds of a classroom lecture. A good example is French mathematician Évariste Galois, who at age 18 made fundamental discoveries in polynomial theory. Yet this was not accepted until long after his tragic death at age 20. He is sometimes mentioned as the smartest person who ever lived. The likelihood of a “new Galois” raising some issue in a modern classroom is very low. Few such hyper-geniuses have walked the earth. The probability of a professor immediately grasping and accepting it is even lower: Évariste Galois - Wikipedia
This isn’t the same thing but a 23 year old student did find a mistake in Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia, one of the most well studied scientific works in the world, while doing a routine homework assignment. He corrected the mistake and got an A+ from his professor for it.
Interesting. The last line of that article made me LOL.
I was going to mention Frank Nelson Cole’s dramatic reveal of the factors of M[sub]67[/sub], but on checking it turns out that someone else had already figured out that it wasn’t a Mersenne prime and Cole just identified what the factors actually were.
Pity, as it was a good story.
Wiles published his proof in 1993; errors were found and a corrected version was published to huge acclaim in 1995. This article in Scientific American from 1999 Are mathematicians finally satisfied with Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem? Why has this theorem been so difficult to prove? | Scientific American notes that there were no concerns among mathematicians at that point that there was anything wrong with the proof. All happened this year is that Wiles got another (well-deserved) award.
It didn’t happen in the middle of a lecture, but it’s related.
James Watt was an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow who was given the lecture model of the Newcomen Steam Engine to repair in 1763. He noted how inefficient it was (it required the engine cylinder to be extremely hot at one stage of the cycle, and extremely cold at another, if it was going to operate efficiently). He designed a completely new engine that eliminated the difficulty by adding an extra Condenser cylinder that stayed cool while the main cylinder could remain hot. This greatly increased the efficiency and reduced the fuel requirements (Watt’s engine used 75% less fuel than Newcomen’s engine), making a quantum leap in manufacturing cost savings.
Watt went into business for himself, not surprisingly.
Thanks for that correction, however this still proves the point. Wiles did not suddenly realize during a classroom lecture he had the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem, interrupt a professor and tell him it can be proved. Even had he done that, the professor could not have comprehended and accurately verified it within a few minutes. It took a lot of time and study, revisions and cross checking by other people. This is despite the theorem being concise enough to write on one line of a blackboard.
In earlier eras the chance of the OP’s scenario is obviously greater. When knowledge bases are more rudimentary there’s a greater chance an individual could suddenly spot a fundamental error or realize some major improvement. However the OP’s question was not deeply historical. Even though he said “has there ever been”, he was obviously thinking about modern times because he mentioned projected slides and whiteboards.
This has probably happened in some field at some point in the fairly distant past. It is difficult to see it being very likely in recent times. OTOH there have been thousands if not millions of cases where a student confidently thought they found some new insight that everyone else had missed, only to be proven wrong.
This is not to discourage students from asking questions, challenging accepted understanding or thinking freely – that’s one way to learn. However the probability of the OP’s scenario happening in recent periods seems vanishingly small.
I agree completely.
In the third grade we were reading a story about a young Indian boy who lived on the banks of the Amazon River, and our teacher dovetailed it with a social studies lesson by having us locate India on a map, where the Amazon is. :smack:
That’s the first time I remember raising my hand to correct a teacher. “I thought the Amazon was in South America?” She didn’t believe me until we found it on the world map on the wall.
Would Jocelyn Bell be in this discussion?
Sort of a “this changed everything” moment, although not a lecture and not scientific.
George Bernard Shaw got an offer from a razor company to shave his beard, and they would pay him. Shaw refused, and said it was because of something that happened when he was little.
He was watching his father shave, and asked, “Daddy, why do you shave?”
His father dropped the razor, and stood there for a full minute, silent.
“Why the hell do I?” he said, and never did again.
Regards,
Shodan