An example of an extremely strong scientific consensus today is that faster than speed of light communication is impossible.
My guess is that when consensus is so strong – with every tenured university physicist who works in the area now agreeing – the consensus view is correct. Still, I’m wondering if modern history supports that kind of thinking.
Lack of worldwide scientific communication makes the pre-modern situation less relevant. I am mostly interested in examples since 1900 or so.
The consensus that the the matches between South America’s coastline and Africa’s (etc.) was mere coincidence was pretty universal until after 1950 or so (until there was sea floor map evidence and an understanding of what continental plates are)
The term “atom” means uncuttable. It wasn’t until 1899 that J.J. Thomson discovered the electron, proving that atoms were not one indivsible unit.
Wasn’t it the consensus, before the development of quantum mechanics, that the universe (or at least matter and energy on Earth) was deterministic and followed Newtonian mechanics, so that the position and velocity of every particle should be knowable given sufficiently accurate / sensitive instruments?
Well, yes, before the advancement of plate techtonics, the Earth’s crust was generally thought to be relatively static – this posed a problem for Scientology when it described an incident that happened on the big island of Hawai’i 75 million years ago, a time when the big island did not exist according to modern thinking.
There is the fairly well known matter of the Channeled Scablands in eastern Washington state, which were naturally believed to have been the result of millions of years of geologic process, until a geologist, J Harlan Bretz, proposed a theory that the land had been shaped in rather short order by massive flooding from “Lake Missoula” when its glacial ice dam broke. This is now the generally accepted model.
In 1982 two Australian researchers, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren discovered the role of bacterium Helicobacter pylori in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease
Prior to this discovery it was a long-standing belief in medical teaching and practice, indeed built into significant industry, that stress and lifestyle factors were the major causes of peptic ulcer disease. Warren and Marshall demonstrated that H. pylori, causes more than 90% of duodenal ulcers and up to 80% of gastric ulcers.
For their paradigm altering work Marshall and Warren were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
The Big Bang was initially a derisive term for a hypothesis that seemed truly outlandish. Then they encountered the microwave background radiation.
Gout (“the disease of kings”) was previously thought to be a dietary disease, but since the last decade or so, it is now thought to be more of a genetic condition, whose flare-ups can still be partly caused by diet. But the primary mechanism is now thought to be genetic, not lifestyle.
Other examples… dinosaurs and feathers, eugenics and craniology, homosexuality as a formal disease diagnosis in the DSM.
Was there any sort of scientific consensus, or was it just not really dealt with because nobody thought there was anything to form a consensus on in the first place? I’m not a geologist, nor was I around back then, but I though the progression was something along the lines of 1) Huh, these continents kinda look like they have matching coast lines, neat. 2) Maybe these continents were once touching and they moved apart? Interesting, but we have no evidence to support that hypothesis. 3) Sea floor mapping, radiometric dating, and fossil/mineral analysis are substantial evidence of plate tectonics.
The only scientific consensus that I see is part 3. If you’re looking for the “strongest scientific consensuses” then I would think that requires published and peer-reviewed scientific theories that were widely challenged and stood up to scrutiny until some new discovery proved them wrong. Not just “oh here’s what some scientists generally thought but didn’t formalize, and it turned out wrong.” I don’t know if Newtonian physics counts as being disproven by relativity and quantum mechanics because Newtonian physics still works at the scale under which it was developed.
I think I’ll have to disagree here. I think it was heavily postulated that the continents were once fit together, but it was only after plate tectonics’ was the mechanism for the fitting worked out.
From Wiki:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_driftThe speculation that continents might have “drifted” was first put forward by Abraham Ortelius in 1596.
Prior to the evidence that supported plate tectonics, the consensus theory for large scale geologic changes and formations was geosynclinal theory which posited in-place, gravity-driven basin collapse, infill by erosion and sedimentation and mountain building through contraction and folding of the earth’s crust. Although Alfred Wegener had first proposed continental drift in 1912, it was rejected by the vast majority of geologists as lacking evidence beyond the puzzle piece continental shapes or a driving force until the seafloor spreading evidence in the 1950s
Thank you.
Yes, that was what I was thinking of – with there having been a period of real, if mistaken, settled science – in starting the thread.
Before doing any research, I recalled that there was a consensus regarding peptic ulcers being caused by stress, replaced in the 1980’s with the cause being a bacterial infection.
But these two links show my memory of there being an old-time consensus on the cause of peptic ulcers was mistaken:
Depending on what we mean by consensus, and the conclusion that some might take away from threads like this, many of these examples could be misleading.
The strongest consensuses (yes it’s a word) are when a model has made many precise predictions that were subsequently verified. It’s very unlikely for such a model to then be found to be outright wrong; all the predictions would have to have been right by random chance.
So we’re looking instead at examples like:
In the 1980s, Luis and Walter Alvarez - a father/son physicist/geologist dou - proposed that the dinosaurs went extinct because of a massive asteroid impact that left a layer of iridium (which is normally very rare on Earth) all over the planet at the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene. This idea was, for the most part, dismissed as outdated catastrophism. See, old timey scientists who wanted to work the biblical flood myth thought that geologic events were caused by quick and catastrophic events, but serious scientists knew better - everything in geology happens because of gradual shifts and forces.
It wasn’t until the Chicxulub Crater was discovered in the 90s that the Alvarez Impact Hypothesis gained widespread acceptance.
That’s not accurate at all.
There had been speculation of a K-T impact event for decades. Schoolchildren through the 70s and 80s were taught about the hypothesis. But the presence of Iridium alone, as the Alvarez hypothesis suggested, wasn’t enough on its own to confirm it, though it added valuable additional supporting evidence. It was the disclosure of Chicxulub (the Mexican national oil company thought it was volcanic in origin when it was discovered early in the 80s) and subsequent additional research finally provided enough evidence to finally solidify the story.
The “old time scientists are too set in their ways” is an urban myth for the most part and especially in this case.
Though the thread is mostly about most-1900 scientific discoveries, even the old horse about Galileo bucking the authorities is mostly a myth. Copernicus and his heliocentric theory predated Galileo by decades and was the subject of a major internal debate within the Church. The actual story was nowhere close to the modern myth of the lone scientist standing up against a recalcitrant central authority.