I made the statement, “AFAIK, not one single modern phenomenon that has been dubbed woo has proven to be real.”
Of course many advances in science have been disbelieved at one point or another. Germ theory. Continental drift. The existence of atoms. The commonality of all is that the evidence was slim to non-existent - until scientists, no one else, provided irrefutable evidence.
Woo, more formally known as woo-woo, has this definition:
also woo-woo, derisive term for things deemed pseudo-scientific or superstitious, by 1971, probably from the moaning sounds traditionally assigned to ghosts (compare goetia). Also as a noun, “superstitious person” or in reference to the superstition itself (“I don’t believe that kind of woowoo”).
In the scientific spirit, I’m checking to see if I’m wrong about this. I could be, depending on how expansive your definition of woo is. Medicine has accepted a lot of practices that were totally out of the mainstream 50 years ago. Acupuncture, e.g.
So have at me. What woo from the last 50 years (when did we stop saying woo-woo?) has become accepted?
Acupuncture, perhaps? Though the Chinese medicine theories of qi, meridians, etc. which underlie it are bunk, AIUI, there’s been legitimate research on it, which has, at least in part, explained why it does appear to be effective for some people.
The idea that stomach ulcers were caused by bacteria was completely disregarded for a couple of years until a scientist gave himself an ulcer by consuming H. pylori then curing it with antibiotics.
Not sure that qualifies. The OP would have to render a specific verdict, but what is woo?
I’ll take a stab that woo is not merely an assertion for which evidence is presently lacking. It’s an assertion that actively flouts the evidence and theories we do have, and/or one that claims to overturn a major paradigm or posits some major area of Nature as yet undiscovered or at least uninvestigated rigorously. A major corollary of woo is that it often, but not always, presents unfalsifiable claims.
At the time ulcers were not yet linked to H. pylori, what were they thought to be caused by? The existence of various bacterial diseases was a well-accepted theory & fact by that time. If somebody thought ulcers were caused by evil spirits and that later proved true, that would be a woo explanation becoming real. That it proved to be a particular bacteria fit pretty well with our general model of disease.
The idea that cervical cancer was strongly correlated with HPV viral infection was certainly controversial. But it didn’t seek to overturn any paradigms. And once proven, well, it’s real obvious that it’s valid.
Praying to be healed of something is pseudoscience. And yet we know it works! It just doesn’t work better than placebo, because it is a placebo. A bunch of woo treatments actually work because placebos work, and the more invasive the placebo the better they work.
I mean, I don’t know if it’s counts as “woo”, but I can remember a time where you’d find it in books of the paranormal and not really taken seriously anywhere else.
Now ISTM it’s widely accepted as a physical phenomenon, even while we have yet to confirm an exact cause. And even though we’re still skeptical about some of the more fantastical claims.
Stress and spicy food was considered the cause of peptic ulcers and the assertion that bacteria could live in stomach acid was ridiculed based on all the scientific knowledge at the time, which was 1982. If the OP can be answered it is going to reveal the existence of poor science and ignoring scientific evidence as in this case.
What’s this at one point or another business? The sitting Secretary of Health and Human Services doesn’t believe in germ theory. He thinks diseases are caused by miasma.
Now it all makes sense, though — RFK doesn’t believe germs are real.
That’s a serious claim, and we have so much evidence that germs cause disease, you probably don’t have a category in your brain for a real person in real life who actually believes germ theory is wrong, much less the person in charge of our nation’s health. And yet, as Ars Technica recently pointed out, that claim is based on RFK’s own words that he published in his book The Real Anthony Fauci. You just have to look at the Miasma vs. Germ Theory section of the chapter he titled “The White Man’s Burden.” Yikes. On so many levels.
Thats a fun example because it shows the hidebound medical establishment was not taking germ theory seriously enough only 40-some years ago. But today as then, the woo-providers insist that gem theory is a lie, maintained only by the lockstep adherence of Big Pay-Attention-To-Evidence-Eventually
This isn’t to say that we’re all living in the Hundred Acre Wood with Ents but there’s a bit more going on than we’d all been thinking in the last few decades.
Alternative Medicine such as chiropractic medicine
Traditional Chinese Medicine
Cryptozoology - the Okapi
In a separate category I would list paradigm shifts and reconsideration of evidence such as
Plate Tectonics
H. pylori as cause of ulcers
Low levels of alcohol aren’t actually good for the heart, it’s just an artifact that people who are sick tend to refrain from drinking
Germ Theory of Disease
Theory of Evolution
Normal Science
Special Cases:
Osteopathic Medicine - started out as woo, then embraced science, and now has medical schools at top universities. This is distinct from Osteopathy which is woo AFAICT.
Massage therapy - which never was quite considered woo, but wasn’t prescribed very often
No man, that’s not it (special pleading)
UFOs: NASA now searches for life on mars.
Alchemy - many of the alchemists were primitive chemists
Witchcraft - discrimination against midwives
Spoon bending - NYT business writer recontextualizes it to challenge our views of reality and other mumbo jumbo in a pit thread a few years back.
Loch Ness Monster - could be otters
Acupuncturists and chiropractors can do something useful, even if their underlying conceptual framework is bunk.
So science will accept your woo if you can show a recognizable scientific process, undergo peer review, etc.
Arguably, lasers. While I don’t know if the specific term was used, in early sci-fi circles the idea of a visible “ray” that could hurt, damage or destroy things was repeatedly used as an example of bad science. It was asserted that any real beam weapon or tool would have to be formed of invisible radiation. There were even some stories that used the “impossibility” of visible destructive beams as as a plot point.
Then lasers were invented, and everyone stopped saying that.
I can’t see how that would be true. Even the ancients knew that concentrated sunlight could burn (even if the whole thing about Archimedes’ burning mirrors thing is apocryphal).
In 1826, French scientist and naval officer Jules Dumont d’Urvillereported waves as high as 33 m (108 ft) in the Indian Ocean with three colleagues as witnesses, yet he was publicly ridiculed by fellow scientist François Arago. In that era, the thought was widely held that no wave could exceed 9 m (30 ft).[18][19]
Prions as a cause of disease. The idea that proteins themselves could cause an infectious disease was very controversial, and many scientists felt there was an undiscovered virus behind prion diseases.
The idea that the microbes in your digestive system affected your mood.