Things 'proved' to be impossible . . . that turned out to be true

[ftg]

@Jeff_Lichtman

I just thought of another one. Physicists had “proved” that a soap bubble in the shape of a cube was impossible because surface tension minimizes surface area. A guy named Tom Noddy figured out how to do it. The cubic bubble doesn’t stand by itself, but it’s a cube nonetheless. Here he is demonstrating it on the Letterman show.

That’s not a cube. It sort of looks slightly cubish.

Note that the angle formed by two soap bubbles in 120 degrees. Cubes don’t have 120 degree angles. The video shows rounding near the edges to make the edges 120 instead of 90 degrees.

It is still impossible.

[scr4]

@Jeff_Lichtman

I just thought of another one. Physicists had “proved” that a soap bubble in the shape of a cube was impossible because surface tension minimizes surface area. A guy named Tom Noddy figured out how to do it. The cubic bubble doesn’t stand by itself, but it’s a cube nonetheless. Here he is demonstrating it on the Letterman show.

That’s not a cube, that’s a shape made up of 6 spherical surfaces. Besides, I’m sure no physicist has ever proven this would be impossible. It’s basic physics/math to show that a stand-alone bubble without external force would be a sphere, but that’s all.

[Harg_Fargusen]

Hitler attacking England, according to Chamberlain.

[FXMastermind]

@KarlGauss

I want to know what things have been ‘proved’ to be impossible yet subsequently become reality, or subsequently were proved to exist? (The key point being that they were supposedly ‘proved’ impossible, not just declared to be so.)

Finding a species that was extinct for the last 66 million years is a good example.

[lisiate]

@Xema

The world record was over 6.5 ft in 1912, and reached 7.4 ft well before the Fosbury Flop.

Here’s the Wiki article.

The thing I find more interesting is that Sotomayor’s record was set back in 1993. In the twenty years before that the record increased by 6 inches, but since then nothing. What’s up with that?

[scr4]

@FXMastermind

Finding a species that was extinct for the last 66 million years is a good example.

No, “believed to be extinct” is not the same as “proven not to exist.” Nobody ever proved they were extinct, because it’s impossible to prove a negative like this.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@KarlGauss

Here’s a popular collection (wherein you’ll find such ostensible utterances as ’ “Everything that can be invented has been invented”. – Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899’ and ’ “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” – Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.')

Those are funny, but that’s not what I’m looking for.

By the way, has anyone gotten the OP’s link to work? When I click it, my computer tries to open a .LIS file, whatever that is.

I want to know what things have been ‘proved’ to be impossible yet subsequently become reality, or subsequently were proved to exist? (The key point being that they were supposedly ‘proved’ impossible, not just declared to be so.)

My motivation for this thread comes from the fact that I was telling my daughter how there are “all types” of examples where something was proved to be impossible only to have it come true at a later date. But, when I tried to come up with specific examples to illustrate my point, I have to admit that I had a hard time. I mentioned how Eddington (I think it was him) declared that it was impossible for the Sun to be more than some millions of years old since that was the maximum time it could have continued to produce such vast quantities of energy. I went on to explain that his ‘proof’ was true only in a worldview where nuclear energy had not been discovered.

Any other examples where things that were proved as being impossible would eventually be shown to be true, or eventually shown to exist? Again, the key word here is ‘proved’ (not merely asserted as being impossible). I am beginning to think that I was wrong in saying there were “all types of examples”.

From your example, it looks like the kind of thing you’re looking for is where a commonly-accepted proof is later rendered invalid because of new information that reveals that one of the assumptions the proof is based on is unwarranted. Yes?

In mathematics, there are examples of where someone thought he had a proof of something (e.g. Fermat’s Last Theorem; the Four-Color Theorem) which turned out to be based on an unwarranted assumption, so that something which was supposedly proved to be impossible really hadn’t been. However, I don’t know offhand of any cases where the flaw in the supposed proof wasn’t discovered well before either a correct proof or a counterexample was found.
I want to caution you. If your point is “When people say that something has been proven impossible, don’t you believe it—just keep on trying,” I contend that this is a bad message to be sending. In the vast majority of cases, not trusting the experts and their proofs puts you on the side of the cranks—the anti-vaxers, the trisectors, the Holocaust deniers. See the fallacy “They Laughed At Einstein.”

[ExTank]

@cmkeller

The sinkability of the Titanic?

No one at the time, who knew anything about nautical engineering, thought that the Titanic was unsinkable. What they couldn’t conceive of was an accident capable of doing sufficient damage to overwhelm the engineering safeguards they had designed. Subtle difference.

An enthusiastic engineering/trade journal touted her as virtually unsinkable, due to these engineering innovations and lack of imagination.

The popular press of the time conveniently ignored the “virtually,” and White Star Line management conveniently reaped the favorable PR fallout.

Then they sailed her at damn near top-speed into an ice field, ignoring ice warnings that put berg and pack ice directly in her path, and quite possibly (I’m convincved) encountered an interesting atmospheric phenomenon.

It was less that she was unsinkable than it was unthinkable that anything sufficiently bad could happen to her to make her sink.

[Francis_Vaughan]

@ExTank

It was less that she was unsinkable than it was unthinkable that anything sufficiently bad could happen to her to make her sink.

Or possibly: unthinkable that anyone would be sufficiently careless to allow something bad enough to happen. All ships depend upon seamanship to keep them out of trouble, and the bigger they are the more true this is - as the trouble and your ability to get into it scales as well.

[drewtwo99]

@drewtwo99

Quasicrystalswere believed to be impossible, but one scientist fought long and hard and proved that they exist and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it in 2011. I don’t know if there were any formal proofs for why they shouldn’t be able to exist, but it was the widely held academic belief for decades that he was wrong, until he finally proved them right.

Could any chemists/scientists chime in on this and expand on it? I remember this being a big effing deal when it happened though. I think this is a strong contender for what the OP is looking for.

[AaronX]

Hey, if we’re just looking at famous, smart people who were wrong in their area of knowledge, Heinrich Wieland, 1927 Nobel laureate in Chemistry, rejected the existence of organic macromolecules.

[AaronX]

@drewtwo99

Could any chemists/scientists chime in on this and expand on it? I remember this being a big effing deal when it happened though. I think this is a strong contender for what the OP is looking for.

This document (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2011/popular-chemistryprize2011.pdf) (pdf) by the Nobel Foundation might explain a bit. Basically, it was thought impossible to have a repeating pattern without translational symmetry. Something like tessellating a regular pentagon in 2D.

[ExTank]

@Francis_Vaughan

Or possibly: unthinkable that anyone would be sufficiently careless to allow something bad enough to happen. All ships depend upon seamanship to keep them out of trouble, and the bigger they are the more true this is - as the trouble and your ability to get into it scales as well.

Fair 'nuf. Amend my closing statement as follows:

It was less that she was unsinkable than it was unthinkable that, under ordinary competent seamanship and ordinary weather/atmospheric conditions, anything sufficiently bad could happen to her to make her sink.

[Saint_Cad]

I remember a story so it could be UL that the first steamship to cross the Atlantic carried aboard a proof that such a trip was impossible based on the amount of coal it would have to carry.

[Donnerwetter]

I nominate Ignaz Semmelweis. His findings weren’t actually proven to be incorrect, but nevertheless widely rejected. The man was ridiculed.

Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis discovered in 1847 that hand-washing with a solution of chlorinated lime reduced the incidence of fatal childbed fever tenfold in maternity institutions. However, the reaction of his contemporaries was not positive; his subsequent mental disintegration led to him being confined to an insane asylum, where he died in 1865.

Semmelweis’s critics claimed his findings lacked scientific reasoning. The failure of the nineteenth-century scientific community to recognize Semmelweis’s findings, and the nature of the flawed critiques outlined below, helped advance a positivist epistemology, leading to the emergence of evidence-based medicine.

Contemporary reaction to Ignaz Semmelweis

[Quercus]

Alternatively, you could go with ‘proof’ in the legal sense. The Innocence Project can provide a big list of cases where someone was legally proved to have committed a crime, but further evidence proved it not so.

[Sailboat]

@Superhal

Oh, now that smoking is mentioned, I know of another example:

For years, it was “proved” that second hand smoke causes lung cancer. The government and various groups pushed this through as though it was a proven fact, much like how they pushed marijuana will make you a crazed rapist, to get people not to try it. However, in the original research study, it was only a single person who lived in a closed environment with a 4 pack a day smoker. They also did not explain that plenty of non-smokers also get lung cancer.

Lung cancer overall was very rare when smoking had yet to be popularized by the distribution of free cigarettes to soldiers during the Great War. One doctor called in colleagues from far away to see the one case he encountered.

The idea that the same smoke which we know causes cancer when the person who lit the match inhales it will not cause cancer when the person standing next to him inhales it is some kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy. The fact that it might be difficult to prove to the satisfaction of people who don’t want to hear it doesn’t make it suddenly safe.

[Leaper]

@Senegoid

Prior to the Great Depression of the 1930’s, economists believed that such a depression was impossible. Based on well-established economic theories (commonly called “classical economics” now), and supported by all the math, it was considered that an economy would naturally tend towards a state of “maximal productivity” (or nearly so). Any deviation from this would set in motion a series of negative feedbacks, all tending to push the economy back towards an equilibrium state of high productivity. This was also the argument for a pure market-based economy without any artificial government interference.

When the Great Depression hit, and further, when it persisted for several years, economists were dumbfounded. This was simply NOT how an economy could possibly behave, and they had well-established mathematical models to prove it!

I’d be interested in reading some of these dumbfounded reactions. Know of any resources?

[pravnik]

@drewtwo99

Quasicrystalswere believed to be impossible, but one scientist fought long and hard and proved that they exist and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it in 2011. I don’t know if there were any formal proofs for why they shouldn’t be able to exist, but it was the widely held academic belief for decades that he was wrong, until he finally proved them right.

That was exactly what I though of when I read the thread title. It’s a great story. Dan Shechtman was a pariah and a kook shunned and derided by the greatest minds in the field for decades because of his discovery of “impossible” quasicrystals, until he was proven right and won the Nobel Prize. Cutting and pasting my previous comment from a couple of earlier threads because I’m lazy:

(The 2011) Nobel Prize in Chemistry recipient Dan Shechtman was ridiculed and ostracized for many years for the work that ended up getting him the Nobel Prize. In 1982 Shectman discovered quasicrystals, which appeared to violate all the rules about how crystals are supposed to fit together. He was laughed at, mocked, insulted and kicked out of his research group. Two time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling ridiculed him mercilessly, saying “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.” After other researchers proved his work, the Nobel Prize committee said Shechtman “eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter.” Shechtman himself said:

“For a long time it was me against the world. I was a subject of ridicule and lectures about the basics of crystallography. The leader of the opposition to my findings was the two-time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, the idol of the American Chemical Society and one of the most famous scientists in the world. For years, 'til his last day, he fought against quasi-periodicity in crystals. He was wrong, and after a while, I enjoyed every moment of this scientific battle, knowing that he was wrong.”

Previous threads:
Historic examples of “Fools! I’ll show them all!” or “With Blackjack, and Hookers!”
Vindicated “Crank” Scientists of the Modern Age

[Lumpy]

@Senegoid

Prior to the Great Depression of the 1930’s, economists believed that such a depression was impossible. Based on well-established economic theories (commonly called “classical economics” now), and supported by all the math, it was considered that an economy would naturally tend towards a state of “maximal productivity” (or nearly so). Any deviation from this would set in motion a series of negative feedbacks, all tending to push the economy back towards an equilibrium state of high productivity. This was also the argument for a pure market-based economy without any artificial government interference.

When the Great Depression hit, and further, when it persisted for several years, economists were dumbfounded. This was simply NOT how an economy could possibly behave, and they had well-established mathematical models to prove it!

Enter John Maynard Keynes. He was able to come up with an alternate self-consistent mathematical model of how an economy could work that was different from the then-standard model. In his model, it was possible for an economy to fall into a stable mode at any level of productivity, even a low level. It explained what was going on the the real world at the time. And the Keynsian model did something more: It offered a prescription for how to break out of the stable depressed economy. That prescription called for massive government deficit spending during periods of depression to goose the economy and get it going again. This was the Roosevelt’s justification for all the public spending programs of the Depression era.

But did the classic economic theories take into account deliberate government interference, such as the war economies of WW1, or the protectionist tariffs enacted in the early '30s?