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The Major Theoretical Blunders That Held Back Progress In Modern Astronomy
KentuckyFC (1144503) writes "The history of astronomy is littered with ideas that once seemed incontrovertibly right and yet later proved to be bizarrely wrong. Not least among these are the ancient ideas that the Earth is flat and at the center of the universe. But there is no shortage of others from the modern era. Now one astronomer has compiled a list of examples of wrong-thinking that have significantly held back progress in astronomy. These include the idea put forward in 1909 that telescopes had reached optimal size and that little would be gained by making them any bigger. Then there was the NASA committee that concluded that an orbiting x-ray telescope would be of little value. This delayed the eventual launch of the first x-ray telescope by half a decade, which went on to discover the first black hole candidate among other things. And perhaps most spectacularly wrong was the idea that other solar systems must be like our own, with Jupiter-like planets orbiting at vast distances from their parent stars. This view probably delayed the discovery of the first exoplanet by 30 years. Indeed, when astronomers did find the first exo-Jupiter, the community failed to recognize it as a planet for six years. As Mark Twain once put it: 'It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.'"
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Yes, The Academy laughed at your ideas. They also laughed at The Three Stooges.
Sometimes, reviewers reject radical ideas that turn out to be correct. Far more often, though, they reject radical ideas because they're demonstrably ridiculous. You might be the next unsung genius, with the crazy idea that will make all the pieces fall into place. It's far more likely that you're a crackpot.
Suppose one rejected idea in 1000 is actually a revolution in waiting. (I suspect that ratio is generous at best.) Now, suppose we publish one (or ten) rejected ideas in every issue of our journal. How many of those rejected ideas will turn out to be worthwhile? How long will people put up with the "alternative views" section of our journal before they just start skipping them?
nuff said
For example Los Alamos scientists figured out gamma ray bursts from stars, from anomalies in their earth watching satellites.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_(satellite)#Role_of_Vela_in_discovering_gamma-ray_bursts
1960s space colonies and orbital manufacturing nonsense? THOSE were blunders!!
Just like they thought the Milky Way was the entire universe in the 1920s, or how they thought there were canals on Mars as signs of an ancient civilization, or how Venus was this lush tropical paradise...
One by one, the juvenile fantasies evaporated in front of the adult realities.
For example, no one needs perfect ball bearings made in free-fall, the ones we make here are all good enough for all the jet engines in the world, and I thought 3D printing was going to be the next big thing, why do you need free-fall when you can position matter atom by atom?
Space is empty, space is dead, space is hostile. No one's going anywhere.
Thanks for the story
You may also point the the original article (PDF version), there is an handful of examples more.
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Isn't this what science is about? Discovery, exploration, learning.
Of course mistakes will be made along the way. The fact that we can look back and see those mistakes for what they are is a part of the scientific process.
This is a good thing.
From TFS:
Who cares??? We slowed something down by a whole FIVE YEARS! It's not like this encompassed someone's entire career or anything. Or even most of someone's career.
Well, except for the guy who got run over by a truck during the five year delay. His career was pretty much ruined. Of course, being run over by a truck pretty much ruins your career even if there is an X-Ray telescope already in operation....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
perfect example of the "must have it now I'm so bored" generation. OMFG the x-ray telescope was delayed 5 years! The horror! Delayed confirmation of other planetary systems by... 30 years. 30 out of.. 14 billion. Can we seriously get over it?
Gee, the telescope size limit. Guy proposes that they shouldn't be bigger - everyone on the west coast ignores him, build bigger. It may have held back a small group of astronomers, but... /. crowd is heavily biased to young males, but guys, it is to the point the average college student doesn't graduate in 5 years. I've got bottles of booze that I haven't had a drink out of older than that, and projects sitting on my workbench longer than that. One of my dad's HOBBY projects took 3 hours a night, every night for 8 years.. The only one I'd call at ALL significant is the 30 years
X ray Observatory. It delayed things 5 WHOLE YEARS! GASP. Yes, I realize that the
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
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Yes. In different words, there was "scientific consensus" on them. Remember that next time people throw that phrase around to convince you of the correctness of some idea.
And this is why it takes so long to overturn false scientific consensus. Scientific "conspiracies" aren't conspiracies of evil masterminds, they are merely mobbing using peer reviews and grant committees.
Doubt without evidence; what could be more harmful to progress?
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The scientific community never believed the earth was flat.
Is this author saying that when scientists have to prioritize limited personel, time, and money based on incomplete information they sometimes arrive at a suboptimal solution? Shameful.
They should probably wait until they know everything about what they'd like to study before they start studying it - that would really speed things up.
TFA had the 200 inch Hale telescope on a fictional geogrphical location, Mt. Palomar. The real name is Palomar Mountain. A minor detail, and very common error, but it is the same kind of error the author was complaining about.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
It's a good thing this can't happen in climate science.
Tycho Brahe considered the idea that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe and actually moved. However when he tried to measure stellar parallax he found he couldn't. So given the evidence he had he either had to go with the Earth doesn't move or the stars are really far away.(Apparently he considered the simpler explanation to be the Earth doesn't move.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I am curious about which astronomers espoused a flat earth considering that around 2,200 years ago the Greek scientist Eratosthenes not only espoused a spherical earth but calculated both the circumference and the axial tilt with great accuracy for his day. Certainly well before Eratosthenes it was realized that as a ship approached an island or a headland that the mountains, hills, etc. appeared before buildings in the harbor, etc. and that s a ship approached land the top of the mast would be seen first then more of it and then the ship itself. They also noticed that the moon appeared spherical and the earth's shadow on the moon during an eclipse appeared to be a shadow of a sphere.
The notion that learned people in the late 1490's thought that earth was flat was popularized by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem "Columbus".
So again, can anyone name an astronomer who thought the earth was flat?
science makes progress BECAUSE of 'blunders' not despite them.
It's not so much that it's biased towards young males, it's that it's heavily biased towards people who have the attention span of the MTV generation and who don't really grasp delayed gratification. They grew up with instant availability of anything digital via the internet, and if it's a physical thing it's available quickly because two day shipping is now the norm.
That's a generalization of course, and there are exceptions... But I'm fifty and many people that I've met that are under about thirty five or so don't readily grasp timescales longer than a week or two. They know that such things exist, but they don't really think on that timescale.
Indeed. I just made tentative travel plans for 2015 (high school reunion) and solid plans for 2016 (SSBN crew reunion)... Some of us from high school are already pondering as far out as 2021 (our 40th anniversary). I'm halfway through my six year plan to re-make my workshop. I just started a five year long project experimenting aging vodka with toasted and charred chips of various woods, and I just set down a batch of my custom whisky blend aimed at being ready for for the holiday season. Etc... etc...
Set against the scale of human history, thirty years is nothing. Five years is less than nothing.
And this was in turn superseded by the 200-inch telescope at nearby Mount Palomar in 1947 which remained the largest telescope in the world until 1993.
Not true - in 1975, BTA-6 in the Soviet Union became the biggest at 236 inches, though it never worked properly.
"It's when your quote just ain't so." - Oscar Wilde
http://wellnowbob.blogspot.com...
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
The first reason to listen to new ideas is that our present understanding(s) -- theories -- of the universe are majorly flawed.
Wikipedia's List of the Unsolved Problems in Physics has hundreds of questions -- most of them just the flaws in the most "mainstream" theories.
What is your plan for fixing these broken theories? My plan is here.
I come here for the love
too bad Samuel Clemens never said that. you must be a fan of Al Gore who also misquoted him.
"So again, can anyone name an astronomer who thought the earth was flat?"
Your mother!
Mark Twain didn't say that, although it was often attributed to him. It was actually said by "Josh Billings" (Henry Wheeler Shaw) (1818-1885).
Isn't this just called "scientific progress"? When you have little evidence, you won't be able to make brilliant predictions. Gather more evidence, and you can make better predictions. For example:
But instead of rubber stamping the idea, the panel made a monumental error. It concluded that most sources of x-rays would be flaring stars and that consequently, the scientific motivation for an X-ray telescope was weak.
On the basis of the limited evidence available at the time, weren't they right to conclude that an X-ray telescope probably wasn't worth the cost? It's all very well looking back now and shaking our fists at our incompetent ancestors, but weren't they just doing the best they could?
That Newton was such an idiot because he didn't know about general relativity...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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My favorite was the Kantian notion that the universe is infinte, and therefore allows for all the space and all the time for life-by-incremental-changes to occur. A. Einstein had to point out the obvious: all things moving away from a point = a beginning = a beginner.
Cranky educator.
Unfortunately I do not have at hand a list of flat-Earth espousing ancestor scientists.
In support of your 1490's date though, let's not forget that the notion of science and scientific principles didn't really exist, fully formed, prior to the Renaissance. However you should be able to find pockets of practice and belief that would be pre-scientific, or even fully scientific (but not achieving wide-spread acceptance and respectability).
I often think that being able to pick out one ancient figure who had the right idea kind of misses the point. Even multiple names, usually linked by a common school or influence does not really establish that an idea was firmly accepted. Greek ideas and knowledge were nearly lost to the world except for their transmission and updating through the Islamic Golden Age. Certainly the Western European world could not benefit from those ideas until the civilization there recovered from the loss of the Roman Empire.
Another characteristic of ancient knowledge is finding people who were:
1). Right but for the wrong reasons;
2). Wrong, but less wrong than their contemporary peers. In other words they made a respectable advance of knowledge in their time;
3). Completely right on one thing, or even a whole collection of matters, but holding another truck-load of beliefs that are bizarre and archaic to modern eyes.
Einstein? The guy who preached a steady state universe with his cosmological constant? Something tells me you're not nearly as clever as you think you are.
After creating the theory of General Relativity, Einstein came up with the first cosmological model - one that was static. This was 1916. De Sitter came up with an alternative, but also seemingly static, model in 1917. (De Sitter called them Models A and B). Later, Friedmann (1922, 1924) and Lemaitre (1927) came up with models of expanding universes, but Einstein judged both of them to be bad physics, even going so far as to writing a paper claiming that Friedmann's calculations were in error (a claim he later retracted.) Einstein's influence was so great that these models lay buried until 1930. Einstein wanted the universe to be static (and closed) so he could preserve his beloved Mach's principle. In the end it was a combination of Eddington, de Sitter, Hubble, and Lemaitre who broke the logjam.
It is also tempting to criticize Einstein for the introduction of the "cosmological constant", but since today it is considered to be one possible form of Dark Energy (the Lambda-CDM model), in this instance he gets a pass.
There is about as much evidence for climate change as there is for evolution. If you have problems with both of those, you can stop reading now. We are extremely certain that an increased partial pressure of CO2 must trap more outgoing long wave radiation, there is a lot of uncertainty as to what will happen now that we've cranked up the heat.
Reading through enough atmospheric science texts to be able to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of CO2-induced forcing might take you a day or two. It's no more controversial than Darwin, and the physical properties of atmospheric gases are known to an astoundingly precise degree.
Now, I'm not going to tell you what to do, because that's pretty much your whole problem with the issue. I'm just gonna say there's a lot more people running around trying to characterize the problem than proposing solutions, and they're not usually even the same people. It does make it a lot harder to argue against those stupid librul scientists who want to take your paychecks, but they probably have crap ideas anyway -- take those on their own merits, and the CO2 science on its own.
And realize, mon ami, that the Earth is already visibly warming. I can take you on a nice tour of Alaska sometime and show you glacier overlooks where there is no longer a glacier. Native villages that have existed in the same place for God knows how long need to be relocated now, and Fairbanks has seen a 50% increase in frost-free days since 1900. Four degrees of warming is not quite enough to make the place unrecognizable, but I'll have to preserve my memories carefully, the future will not be so kind.
... because I hope we can discover FTL travel...
Personally, I prefer living in a universe where causes precede effects. We've verified relativity often enough to be pretty sure of its accuracy, and while it doesn't explicitly rule out FTL, it does tie it to causality. So we have three options: [a] relativity is (very) wrong. [b] FTL is possible, or [c] causality is preserved.
Relativity has been tested on small scales and large. We've built bombs and reactors that take advantage of the mass-energy equivalence, and our GPS systems need to account for a couple of relativistic effects. Some hopelessly muddled individual with an axe to grind against intelligentsia suggests that Dark Matter is an invention to patch a hole in relativity, but while patching relativity would be a crowning achievement for any physicist, our observations suggest that whatever the unknown factor is, it's not likely to be a problem with Einstein. Even if it was, it would be a correction for intergalactic distance scales, and not really relevant to our struggles to get through local 4-space.
Out of the two remaining options, the last thing I need is some time traveler mucking up history; my brain isn't equipped to deal with nonlinear time. It's okay for you to make another choice, just be very careful about what you're choosing, just in case you get it.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.