Heck, if the criterion is just having a “destroyed reputation”, Alfred Wegener was widely known among geologists as a crank. Unfortunately that reputation wasn’t destroyed until after his death.
What, no one mentioned Al Gore.
'course he wasn’t ever a scientist, just a huckster. 
Well, arguably so did Jim Jones, Charles Manson and David Khoresh, at least among their followers.
They were, uh… social scientists. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Just a friendly reminder that we’re in GQ here. Please keep the responses appropriate and non-political. Thanks!
[Moderator Note]
PhiloVance, political jabs are not permitted in GQ. In any case, since Gore is not a scientist, there was no reason to bring him into the discussion anyway. No warning issued, but don’t do this again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Woosh…
Wasn’t that his brother in law?
Oops.
Tangentially, I had a college chemistry professor who said that in Russia they refer to the “uncertainty principle” rather than “Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle” due to his role in the Nazi atomic bomb project, but other Russian science professors told me that was incorrect.
Yes, and the fact that he continues to do real work, and that he helps to popularize real physics (and even attempts to explain some of the math to laymen, which nobody else even dares to try), helps a lot.
Nevertheless, his quantum-consciousness nonsense contains as much crank physics as it does crank philosophy. Max Tegmark had a great quote (which I can’t find) about how it’s best to pretend that it’s a different Roger Penrose writing all that nonsense or it’ll color your opinions so much that you’ll miss some brilliant physics and be left a generation behind.
Don’t attempt to measure his role in the bomb project, or else we won’t be able to locate it!
Depending on your POV, linguist Noam Chomsky’s political activities are either principled or an embarrassment. And I don’t mean simply if you’re left/right.
No he didn’t. Kaczynski was completely unaccomplished. He taught undergraduate geometry for two years (and by all accounts, did it poorly) before running off to the woods of Montana and starting his killing spree.
The premise of the OP’s question is twofold: 1) a scientist of some note who 2) later destroyed his reputation because of some sort of kookery or questionable work.
A lot of the replies in this thread are missing one or both elements of the premise.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was a psychiatrist famous for bringing compassion and understanding to the process of dying, and she’ll always be associated with her (often misunderstood) five stages of grief. In the '80’s, friends of mine who were psychotherapists tended to mention her with embarrassed throat clearing because of her involvement with really wacky spiritualism.
Aside from the fact that those vacuum cleaners aren’t all that they’re cracked up to be, they’re also just downright stupid-looking.
ETA: wasn’t John Lilly a respected researcher before he started taking acid and napping in his isolation tank? I’ll have to go wiki that for a refresher…
Thanks all, lots of good examples and food for thought.
Otara
Well, he’s a coward of cosmic proportion. Surely everyone knows of the grand scale of Dyson’s fear.
I’m not sure if this should get a golf clap or rotting tomatoes.
Kaczynski published what is by all accounts a superb doctoral dissertation and several related papers afterwords. Then he went nuts after a few semesters teaching at Berkeley. (Berkeley has that effect on lots of people.) He also taught various calculus classes, not just geometry, and taught while he was a grad student before he was a professor at Berkeley.
It’s pretty disingenuous to say he was “completely unaccomplished.”
Chomsky’s linguistics is pretty bad to the extent he harps on his untestable, unfalsifiable, and quite unscientific notion of ‘deep structure’ and ‘universal grammar’, but his work on formal grammar and the Chomsky hierarchy is unquestionably good and very useful.
This thread reminds me of the “was there ever a real mad scientist” thread. Except that’s not really the title, and I can’t find it. Anyone?
You might also consider Dr. Edward Teller.