Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a physician, albeit an unsuccessful one. He believed in fairies and seances. Even among his contemporaries, this was a little bit out there.
“Even among his contemporaries”? You make it sound as if he were writing in the Middle Ages. He died in 1930.
But he was a bit weird on the subject of Spiritualism. He wrote a godawful Spiritualist novel called The Land Of Mist. I’ve had the misfortune to read it, it’s as if he sacrificed all his writing skill to the cause.
If there was a such thing as a Spiritualism Fundamentalist, Conan Doyle would fit the bill. He was convinced that his wife was a medium from the spirit world and that his dead relatives were telling him (through Lady Doyle) that there was going to be a worldwide cataclysm any day now.
He regularly battled skeptical organizations of the day, often resorting to doctoring evidence and out-and-out lying about what had occurred at seances. Sherlock would not have approved.
Thomas Gold made some serious contributions to astronomy, as well as theorizing that oil is not from decomposed vegetable matter near the surface but instead is formed by bacteria acting on natural gas flows deep in the earth’s crust.
What else do you expect from Milloy?
Percival Lowell was an esteemed astronomer who popularized the “canals on Mars” canard.
Robert Boyle, one of the fathers of modern chemistry, believed it was possible to transmute metals through alchemy. He even got Parliament to repeal Henry IV’s old statute against multiplying gold or silver. He also believed he had proven the existence of phlogiston.
To be honest, that doesn’t sound very *outlandish * to me, just wrong.
I seem to recall that a once-serious scientist (John Gribbon, I think) was involved in the scare-mongering about the wild notion that an unusual alignment of the planets (circa 1979) would case earthquakes.
I couldn’t find much in a Google search, probably because I had the scientist’s name spelled wrong. It was Gribbin, not Gribbon. Cecil wrote about the idea here. Some people apparently believe the notion was a hoax perpretrated by Gribbin, not an honest belief.
J.B. Rhine was a botanist before he took up ESP.
[ur=John Gribbin - Wikipedia]Gribbin (a scientist, but better known as a popular science writer) has stated he was “too clever by half.”
Sorry, Gribbin.
The Jupiter Effect, BTW, is not to be confused with the Harmonic Convergence, except in the sense that both are bullshit.
Edison:
It’s probably also problematic to refer to Edison as a “scientist”, rather than an “inventor” or an “industrialist”.
Edison did have more than a passing fascination with the paranormal. Here’s an article by Martin Gardner from The Skeptical Enquirer:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_n4_v20/ai_18535410
It should be noted that Theosophy and Spiritualism were popular in Edison’s day. Many otherwise hardheaded types like various captains of industry subscribed to those notions to some degree. Being the ultimate tinkerer that he was, Edison apparently did occasionally attempt to construct apparatus to investigate paranormal phenomena, rational scientific basis for them or not.
Well, that’s *another * way to say “making shit up”, I suppose.
That’s just being proven wrong by later, better data. Hardly “outlandish”.
What is so outlandish about that? Isn’t methane abundant in the universe? Given several billion years to mutate and evolve, couldn’t a strain of bacteria arise that would use that methane to its advantage, resulting in heavier hydrocarbons?
You won’t find us to be so wack when the zombie kittens attack! :eek:
starts loading shotgun shells with birdshot and Willy-Peter
Francis Crick (cant get any more famous than that) put forth the idea of directed panspermia – that life on earth may have arisen from a seeding rocket filled with microorganisms sent from another solar system.
And here I thought you meant this old thread.
I believe Kepler thought the planets’ distances from the sun were based on imaginary polyhedra and spheres nested inside one another. The data coincidentally came close to fitting, and it was too nice of a coincidence for it to be mere coincidence, he thought.
I think Einstein’s idea that the passage of time and the length of objects can change depending on your point of view is rather outlandish, as are invisible rays that arise from electric and magnetic fields, and can carry energy and information. They just both happen to be right.