Old theories aren’t discarded just because they aren’t entirely right. Newtons laws are perfectly accurate for most things and are currently taught in highschool physics. Instantaneous light is just fine for everyday stuff, as is a geocentric earth. The old theories aren’t necessarily wrong, their just not great at describing more complicated behaviors. If we were to find evidence that Einstein was wrong, or that homeopathy sometimes worked we wouldn’t toss out the good science that has worked perfectly until now. We would simply refine what we thought we knew to include the new knowledge.
I wonder if the Tongue (or Taste) Map would qualify. Although it was a misrepresentation of the original research, many text books stated that each taste type could only be detected on one part of the tongue.
On another issue, as discussed on the Dope fairly extensively, the classical explanation of how an aircraft flies seems to be increasingly regarded as flawed.
Finally, I was tempted to also add “Pluto is a planet” as being something I was taught which was wrong, but really that’s just a matter of shifting definitions.
Sparky812 writes:
> Back in the day, the Earth was not only flat but the center of the Universe
> around which the Sun and stars rotated.
> To profess anything else was blasphemous and claimants were found to be
> dead wrong, literally and figuratively speaking.
No. It’s been generally accepted since at least the time of the ancient Greeks that the Earth is round.
I’m not sure why “light travels instantaneously” would not be classified as science (when “vision rays” is). Any experiment prior to accurate astronomical instruments would support such a hypothesis. The debate goes back to the ancient Greeks if I’m not mistaken. Aristotle’s view held sway for an awful long time, but to call Aristotle “pre-scientific” does him a bit of a disservice. The fault rather lies with those who accepted his theories without ever testing or improving them.
I wouldn’t say, for instance, that atomic theory (the 18th-20th Century one) was unscientific for being unable to detect subatomic particles.
Though it may be hard to imagine, the same is true today.
I was joking but…
Generally accepted? No.
Please re-read your Classical world history, starting in Ancient Greece with pre-Socratic beliefs and Aristotle’s writings. Then study Mesopotamian, Ancient Egyptian, Chinese and Indian religions and come back when you have an more educated viewpoint.
You’re right.
Phlogiston and the luminiferous ether were two scientific constructs that were pretty universally accepted until it was shown that they didn’t square with the facts.
Also, IIRC, the idea that some craters on Earth might be meteoric in origin was once considered to be a crackpot notion. (And this was after the existence of meteors was accepted.)
Boy, did h. pylori cause a stink in the medical community, when it was proven that the cause of gastric ulcers was NOT stomach acid, as was written in stone for quite some time. It was absolute heresey for sometime, to suggest an infectious component to ulcers, until Nobel prizes were given in 2005, quite a few years after the discovery of h.pylori was made.
/slight hijack
but this thread reminds me of Andrew Wakefield and his fraudulent research that has caused 13 years of misinformation to be propagated by the media and some celebrities.
Wasn’t pus considered a good thing, circa the American civil war?
Fundamentally, science is about making a comprehensible model of the universe. Different scientists sometimes disgree on the correct model. Sometimes the Church or Government disgrees with the model and crap happens.
As has been mentioned above, there are a lot of models that have been discarded due to later observations, such as the geocentric universe. It made sense to people hundreds of years ago to see Earth as the center of the universe. It doesn’t now. That doesn’t make the scientists of the past liars or frauds.
it still is a good thing.
Newtonian mechanics is wrong, but is still a good model for building a bridge. The degree of error you will get by using the Newtonian model/equations/laws as opposed to the Relativity ones are so tiny (unless you are e.g. planning to accelerate to .99 C or something) that it literally doesn’t matter - you can’t work with steel, stone, or wood to a precision anywhere close to the error between Newtonian and Einsteinian physics.
Outright fraud and skewing data, are around more than we’d like to think about. The “publish or perish” mentality, not to mention funding bias of scientific research makes peer review of research so very, very important and now, with such fast communication, more than ever.
The Geology Department was filled with “old coots” who found it hard to let go of obsolete theories that they had been teaching all of their lives. Although it is a good college, it’s fraught with the problem of Professors who stay on longer than their respective “shelf dates”.
Edge.org recently featured responses to a similar question posed by Richard Thaler:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/thaler10/thaler10_index.html
Sparky812 writes:
> Please re-read your Classical world history, starting in Ancient Greece with pre-
> Socratic beliefs and Aristotle’s writings. Then study Mesopotamian, Ancient
> Egyptian, Chinese and Indian religions and come back when you have an more
> educated viewpoint.
No, you’re simply wrong here. Look at this Wikipedia article:
Now look at what you said in your original post:
> Back in the day, the Earth was not only flat but the center of the Universe
> around which the Sun and stars rotated.
> To profess anything else was blasphemous and claimants were found to be
> dead wrong, literally and figuratively speaking.
I don’t know what you could mean when you claim that someone who insisted that the Earth was round would be considered blasphemous and would be executed except that you’re claiming that this is what happened during the Middle Ages in Europe. That’s blatantly false. Every educated person in Medieval Europe (which included all the hierarchy of the Catholic Church) believed that the Earth was round. They knew approximately how big it was. (In fact, Columbus understood the Earth’s size less well than anyone else in 1492. People told him that he could never reach Asia in a ship because it was too far to sail. They were right. If North and South America hadn’t been in the way, he and his men would have starved to death before he could have reached Asia. Columbus, perhaps deliberately, underestimated the size of the Earth to make it seem like he could sail to Asia.) They also knew approximately how big the moon was and how far away it was. Every educated person in Europe since 300 A.D. (which includes everyone of importance in the Catholic Church) has believed that the Earth was round. No one has ever been considered blasphemous and been executed by them for believing that the Earth was round. If you’re claiming that there was some ancient civilization somewhere where they believed that the Earth was flat and who considered people who believed that it was round were blasphemous and should be executed, what civilization was that?
Frankly, I don’t think that describing plate tectonics as a new and still somewhat tentative theory in a college course back in 1975 necessarily qualifies as a symptom of reactionary clinging to obsolete theories. Back in 1975, AFAICT, plate tectonics still was a relatively new and somewhat tentative theory that was not universally accepted among geology researchers, and previous models were not yet “obsolete” as far as mainstream science was concerned.
You seem to be finding it hard to let go of your theory that your husband’s professors of thirty-five years ago must have been closed-minded old coots, simply because they didn’t know as much back then about the validity of the plate-tectonics model as we know about it today.
I looked but haven’t found any indication that there still remained any doubt about plate tectonics by 1975. Except maybe for old fogies who had outlived their time and couldn’t adapt to new knowledge…
“After all these considerations,” [i.e., geophysical discoveries circa 1965] “Plate Tectonics (or, as it was initially called ‘New Global Tectonics’) became quickly accepted in the scientific world.”
In 1967, “Xavier Le Pichon published a complete model based on 6 major plates with their relative motions, which marked the final acceptance by the scientific community of plate tectonics.” So my memories are accurate. The theory finally won out right when I remember it being in the news, in 1967.
It wasn’t the scientific community that still harbored doubts in 1975, although apparently some textbook writers did. Which is why I’m now curious how long does it take textbooks to catch up in the physical sciences. In the 1970s it took at least 9 years for the textbooks to catch up to the science on this matter. How much of a lag is there in science textbooks these days? What factors contribute to either delaying or expediting these updates?