1.) [quote=“MrDibble, post:20, topic:931649, full:true”]
Name five.
[/quote]
1.) Was looking for ignorance fought, and I got it. (Thanks guys)
2.) If I could only name four, would that make my point moot? Lol
I notice you haven’t even named one.
Bingo! Even among scientists who have the best of intentions, there is obviously a conflict of interest between objective, sound research results and the desire to become famous for a historical scientific breakthrough. The effects might even be at the subconscious level. You need verification from a number of different independent scientists and experimental results that are consistently in support of the theory.
Gould did an interesting essay on this subject, though it was mostly exploring who exactly thought the earth was flat then. It seems a few priests thought so, though it was a fringe belief at best. Still, the “laughed at” argument works best when the person laughed at turns out to be correct. Columbus was indeed a good naviagator at getting there - and back - at all. And extremely lucky.
I can come up with Wegener, but that’s about it.
This kind of assumes that theories are important enough to reproduce. Cold fusion, sure. But the secret is that most papers, though they contain information to allow their results to be reproduced, never are because no one cares. I know someone who was doing a PhD in Physics who discovered that one of the results everyone thought was true wasn’t. Alas it wasn’t important enough to be worth a degree on its own, so he got delayed a year or so reworking things.
I prefer the success of a theory in predicting things. Relativity was far better verified by predicting the position of Mercury before the observation, not explaining it afterwards. Ditto the Big Bang theory predicting the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, not explaining it.
Dan Shechtman isn’t quite a household name, but won a Nobel Price for the discovery of quasicrystals. Linus Pauling said this about Schechman:
There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.
Pauling wasn’t the only one to engage in ridicule, either.
I started going to the skeptical sites and Klee Irwin appeared constantly as a pseudo-scientist.
Sure, he relies on others with experience to produce papers, but as I saw in other cases like with UFO believers, climate change minimizers and creationists, first they manage to publish papers in journals that have issues. And before others can check elsewhere and produce confirmation or rebuttals, they shout from the rooftops about “being recognized” so as to get their marks to give them money and support.
It’s sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). But note that he deduced this as the simplest explanation of the failure of the Michaelson-Morley experiment to find any motion through the ether. And his results (special relativity) were accepted pretty quickly. General relativity was a lot harder, but even then he suggested three tests. The first was an anomaly in the orbit of Mercury which had already been observed, but he seemingly didn’t know that; second was the bending of light as it passed by the sun, famously observed by Eddington a couple years later during an eclipse; the third was the gravitational red shift, which was demonstrated at a Hungarian University many years later (shine a light up an elevator shaft and it reddens slightly on the way). But the ultimate experiment has been the success of the GPS. If they hadn’t taken general relativity into account (the clock in orbit is just a bit faster than the one on earth), GPS would drift by about 8 miles a day.
String theory is a mathematically pretty idea, but so far no one can see any feasible way of falsifying it. It also has far too many arbitrary parameters. So far no one has any real theory of merging QM and gravity.
Just want to point out this isn’t inherently true. There is the idea of testing for errors in the simulation, in the same way a glitch hunter can find glitches in video games that let them do things that the rules should not allow.
Granted there’s the difficulty of distinguishing a glitch vs. the way things work. The same issue exists in games, but we at least often know what the intent of the game’s designer was. But there would in theory be a line where “glitch in the simulation” seems the more likely argument–e.g. if we found “arbitrary code execution.”
Not that anyone has gotten anywhere near finding anything like this. It is currently mostly idle speculation. And none of this is to say that anything the OP mentions is any more plausible.
I’d say that a pretty big one is detecting gravitational waves.
Einstein predicted that they would exist, but it took another hundred years before we were able to detect them.
Lynn Margulis was widely ridiculed for endosymbiotic theory (which was not actually “her” theory as it had been previously advanced by Russian botonist Konstantin Mereschkowski and American biologist Ivan Wallin) and it took many decades of her unremitting advocacy before it received wide acceptance. Of course, as noted above, she went on to promote conspiracy theories in other areas and expanded her definition of organism to encompass the entire ecosystem, which is well beyond where any systems biologist would draw a line.
Alford Wegener was roundly criticized for promoting the hypothesis of continental drift, although lacking any mechanism by which seemingly rigid continental masses could float around like sponges the skepticism is understandable. Now that we understand the mechanics of plate tectonics and are able to do more precise radiometric dating the conclusion seems obvious but those tools did not exist in wide use at the time the thesis was proposed.
There is, of course, much ridicule today regarding the accuracy of global climate circulation models in predicting the warming of the atmosphere and oceans along with other facets of anthropomorphic climate change, although the derision and jeering is rooted in anti-science rhetoric and engineered political partisanship rather than any substantive disagreement with the science and techniques used to develop the predictive models.
Beyond that, I don’t have much. Most branches of science advance either as progressive stepwise expansion of existing theory, or in rare revolutionary leaps where a new theory explains a set of phenomena that left the existing science without prediction. In either case, experiment and observation are used to test the theory and validate or falsify specific predictions of it, and a solid theory that makes reliable and measurable predictions tends to quickly silence naysayers through the weight of such evidence.
Well, maybe. I don’t think any reasonable physicist doubts that general relativity is a good theory of gravitation (although any honest physicist will admit that it is an incomplete theory), but we really need more independent measurements to really confirm that what we are observing are actually transient signals in the fabric of spacetime, preferably space-based measurements that aren’t contaminated by seismic effects.
Stranger
There’s Copernicus, Kepler, Aristarchus…
There are a few, and Wegener is a good one, but I wanted to know what the OP considered “mocked as a crackpot”
Opposition for religious dogma is not the same thing as “mocked as a crackpot”. Other astronomers like Kepler and Galileo adopted Copernican heliocentrism, after all.
Again, church opposition. And while people like Galileo were reluctant to adopt his elliptical theories, they didn’t consider him a crackpot. And his work was confirmed immediately after his death.
It is a common misconception that the heliocentric view was held as sacrilegious by the contemporaries of Aristarchus.[6] Lucio Russo traces this to Gilles Ménage’s printing of a passage from Plutarch’s On the Apparent Face in the Orb of the Moon , in which Aristarchus jokes with Cleanthes, who is head of the Stoics, a sun worshipper, and opposed to heliocentrism.[6] In the manuscript of Plutarch’s text, Aristarchus says Cleanthes should be charged with impiety.[6] Ménage’s version, published shortly after the trials of Galileo and Giordano Bruno, transposes an accusative and nominative so that it is Aristarchus who is purported to be impious.[6] The resulting misconception of an isolated and persecuted Aristarchus is still transmitted today.[6][7]
They laughed at Ignaz Semmelweis. They also declared him crazy and threw him into an insane asylum, where he died.
Who?
19th century obstetrician who discovered that deaths in childbirth could be greatly reduced if the doctors would just wash their hands, contrary to all existing medical theory of the day. For this, he was ridiculed and excommunicated from the medical community and more.
You might say he was “mocked as a crackpot.”
I think the existence of paradoxes like Russell’s Paradox could be called a glitch in the Universe.
Seems more a glitch that would likely transcend universes, since math doesn’t really care what the physical properties of reality are.
Don’t really care to get in a debate over semantics.
I don’t know where the glitch is, but Russell’s paradox is in the universe. Here is a simpler version. Take a piece of paper blank on both sides (no Moebius strips allowed). On one side write, “The sentence on the other side of this paper is true.” On the other side, write, “The sentence on the other side of this paper is false.” Discuss the truth status of these sentences.
Huh, whenever I try that, it glitches out and I fall through the floor.
Have to page a GM to get it fixed.