# What are the Strongest Scientific Consensuses That Turned Out to Be Possibly, or Definitely, Wrong? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Tags:** science-math\ **Created:** [September 8, 2026, 12:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-strongest-scientific-consensuses-that-turned-out-to-be-possibly-or-definitely-wrong/1032888 "2026-09-08T00:45:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 11
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-strongest-scientific-consensuses-that-turned-out-to-be-possibly-or-definitely-wrong/1032888/201 "2026-09-29T14:35:10Z")
Yep. Science + sensation → anti-Science. ---
**Author:** ![dcbwhaley](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dcbwhaley/32/21437_2.png) [@dcbwhaley](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dcbwhaley)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 2:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-strongest-scientific-consensuses-that-turned-out-to-be-possibly-or-definitely-wrong/1032888/202 "2026-09-29T14:49:20Z")
Fred also didn’t believe in evolution likening it to a storm blowing through a junkyard and making a 707 aeroplane ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-strongest-scientific-consensuses-that-turned-out-to-be-possibly-or-definitely-wrong/1032888/203 "2026-09-29T14:51:06Z")
> [@Great\_Antibob](#): > > it was never, never, never accepted as a proven statement That is all I meant. Maybe it was suspected by many that it could be proven, and therefore surprising to them when it could not (even some of the people who worked on it failed to recognize that the resulting non-Euclidean geometries were consistent, so there was apparently some mental block to get over in order to take the step of _constructing_ an explicit model) ---
**Author:** ![Francis\_Vaughan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/francis_vaughan/32/3093_2.png) [@Francis\_Vaughan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Francis_Vaughan)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-strongest-scientific-consensuses-that-turned-out-to-be-possibly-or-definitely-wrong/1032888/204 "2026-09-29T15:02:01Z")
> [@PhillyGuy](#): > > My hypothesis, or theory, or whatever others want to call it, is that every tenured physicist, from a major university, who today (say, since 2010) publishes peer reviewed research on related topics, believes that faster than light communication is impossible A bit late commenting - but there are a couple of things worth mentioning here. The question about faster than light communication is interesting. I guarantee there are a non-zero number of tenured major university physicists in the field who are quite open to the possibility that faster than light communication is possible. The problem of causality/locality in quantum theory isn’t going away anytime soon. And there are lots of ideas, and faster than light is only the tip of the wildness. Retrocausality is in there. And (God help us) there are the super-determinists. FTL is something that just gets accepted as a boring consequence of some of the wildness. There are certainly some that hope that a crack in the foundations will emerge experimentally that leads to one of these ideas. A lot of this is fringe, and slides over the boundary into philosophy. But it is around. Not a part of the sample space, but a well known YouTube commentator made a video where she basically said - when I was a little girl I could not conceive that there were not aliens out there. Clearly for an alien civilisation to operate across the stars they must have FTL communications. Therefore FTL is real. Therefore super-determinism. 😧 ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-strongest-scientific-consensuses-that-turned-out-to-be-possibly-or-definitely-wrong/1032888/205 "2026-09-29T18:21:50Z")
> [@dcbwhaley](#): > > Fred also didn’t believe in evolution likening it to a storm blowing through a junkyard and making a 707 aeroplane Not quite. His issue was with **abiogenesis** , not evolution. Hoyle thought panspermia was more likely. He, of course, accepted _evolution._ [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-strongest-scientific-consensuses-that-turned-out-to-be-possibly-or-definitely-wrong/1032888.md?page=10)