Climate deniers are not the first to embrace folly. As with the little child questioning the emperors clothing, sometimes the entire scientific community is misguided and incompetent. Sometimes only the lone voice of the maverick scientist is telling the truth. Below is a list of scientists who were reviled for their crackpottery, only to be later proven correct. Todays science texts are dishonest to the extent that they hide these huge mistakes made by the scientific community. They rarely discuss the embarrassing acts of intellectual suppression which were directed at the following researchers by their colleagues. And... after wide reading, Ive never encountered any similar list.[1] This is very telling. When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. - Jonathan Swift THE LIST: scroll down To add: B Belousov, Carl Woese, Gilbert Ling, John C. Lilly •Arrhenius (ion chemistry) •Alfven, Hans (galaxy-scale plasma dynamics) •Baird, John L. (television camera) •Bakker, Robert (fast, warm-blooded dinosaurs) •Bardeen & Brattain (transistor) •Bretz J Harlen (ice age geology) •Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan (black holes in 1930) •Chladni, Ernst (meteorites in 1800) •Crick & Watson (DNA) •Doppler (optical Doppler effect) •Folk, Robert L. (existence and importance of nanobacteria) •Galvani (bioelectricity) •Harvey, William (circulation of blood, 1628) •Krebs (ATP energy, Krebs cycle) •Galileo (supported the Copernican viewpoint) •Gauss, Karl F. (nonEuclidean geometery) •Binning/Roher/Gimzewski (scanning-tunneling microscope) •Goddard, Robert (rocket-powered space ships) •Goethe (Land color theory) •Gold, Thomas (deep non-biological petroleum deposits) •Gold, Thomas (deep mine bacteria) •Lister, J (sterilizing) •Lovelock, James (Gaia theory) •Maiman, T (Laser) Concepts which have proved useful for ordering things easily assume so great an authority over us, that we forget their terrestrial origin and accept them as unalterable facts. They then become labeled as conceptual necessities, etc. The road of scientific progress is frequently blocked for long periods by such errors. - Einstein •Margulis, Lynn (endosymbiotic organelles) •Mayer, Julius R. (The Law of Conservation of Energy) •Marshall, B (ulcers caused by bacteria, helicobacter pylori) •McClintlock, Barbara (mobile genetic elements, jumping genes, transposons) •Newlands, J. (pre-Mendeleev periodic table) •Nott, J. C. (mosquitos xmit Yellow Fever) •Nottebohm, F. (neurogenesis: brains can grow neurons) •Ohm, George S. (Ohms Law) •Ovshinsky, Stanford R. (amorphous semiconductor devices) •Pasteur, Louis (germ theory of disease) •Prusiner, Stanley (existence of prions, 1982) •Rous, Peyton (viruses cause cancer) •Semmelweis, I. (surgeons wash hands, puerperal fever ) •Shechtman, Dan (quasicrystals) •Steen-McIntyre, Virginia (southwest US indians villiage , 300,000BC) •Tesla, Nikola (Earth electrical resonance, Schumann resonance) •Tesla, Nikola (brushless AC motor) •J H vant Hoff (molecules are 3D) •Warren, Warren S (flaw in MRI theory) •Wegener, Alfred (continental drift) •Wright, Wilbur & Orville (flying machines) •Zwicky, Fritz (existence of dark matter, 1933) •Zweig, George (quark theory) Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they think laughable. -J. W. Goethe Some ridiculed ideas which had no single supporter: •Ball lightning (lacking a theory, it was long dismissed as retinal afterimages) •Catastrophism (ridicule of rapid Earth changes, asteroid mass extinctions) •Child abuse (before 1950, doctors were mystified by spontaneous childhood bruising) •Cooperation or altruism between animals (versus Evolutions required competition) •Instantaneous meteor noises (evidence rejected because sound should be delayed by distance) •Mind-body connection (psychoneuroimmunology, doctors ridiculed any emotional basis for disease) •Perceptrons (later vindicated as Neural Networks) •Permanent magnet levitation (Levitron shouldnt have worked) The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated. - Wilfred Trotter, 1941 The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false. -Paul Johnson Links •viXra: List of crackpots who were Right 2010 •Negative comments and wrong predictions re. new ideas (Foresight inst) •Edge: scientists long-held incorrect beliefs •MeFi: list of vindicated crazy scientists •The Plight of the Obscure Innovator in Science •The Blind Eye of Science •Cognitive Processes & Suppression of Ideas •Closed-minded Science (main page, many other articles) •Neglected Pioneers: Herapath, Waterson •Retraction Watch •Physics: forgotten history •Impossible, another list of vindicated discoveries •Achievements of eccentric loners BOOKS • Hidden Histories of Science, R. Silvers (ed) • Fatal Attractions: The Troubles with Science, H. Bauer • At the Fringes of Science, M. Friedlander • Great Feuds in Science H. Hellman • Great Feuds in Medicine H. Hellman • ...the Myth of the Scientific Method, H. Bauer •MORE... BREAKTHROUGHS DURING DREAMS •Crick, Structure of DNA •Friedrich Kekule, Carbon chains & Benzene Ring sipping brandy, half asleep •S. Ramanujan, multiple proofs detailed daydreams •Otto Loewi, Acetylcholine woke up, wrote it down •Einstein, Special Relativity fever dream while ill •L. Agazzi saw living versions of fossil animals •Mendeleyev, periodic table dream of music/chemistry •H. Poincare, general solution woke up, wrote it down
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 04:35:30 +0000
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