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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.'"
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?
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
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"
> 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?
And communications satellites! Talk about WORTHLESS!
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
nuff said
And yet the Vatican is one of the leading private funders of scientific research. Sometimes it is helpful to check facts before spouting bigotry.
Shockingly, I'm actually aware of the fact that satellites are closer to the Earth than the moon. It turns out that you actually have to launch both satellites AND moon shots out of the Earth's atmosphere. That's "space".
Speaking of fantasies, how about the flying car? Some people still play with jetpacks. The problem is not just energy, but that controlled flight takes a lot more brains than was appreciated. And our mechanical prowess has never been up to the delicacy required to build light enough wings that flap well enough to actually achieve flight, so we've had to compromise with fixed wing designs.
As to wrong science, one idea from the 19th century was "calorie", a fluid that moved heat. Wikipedia has a nice list of wrong ideas in science that gained some popularity and acceptance.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
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.
... 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.