Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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.
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?
In an article on the future of astronomy published in 1908, he wrote: “It is more than doubtful whether a further increase in size is a great advantage.” His argument was that factors other than size had a much bigger influence on astronomical data, factors such as climate. “It seems as if we had nearly reached the limit of size of telescopes, and as if we must hope for the next improvement in some other direction,” he said. Loeb says Pickering’s views had a major impact on observational astronomy on the east coast compared to the west coast of the US. Just as Pickering was publishing his controversial idea, the 60-inch telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angeles, saw first light. And while astronomers in the east were arguing the toss about size, this telescope was gathering the data that would eventually make it one of the most productive in astronomical history. What’s more, at exactly that time, the Mount Wilson observatory received funding to build a 100-inch telescope and this was completed in 1917. 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.
Pickering was right: a bigger telescope is not the answer when your site has poor climate, due to diminishing returns. Plus, from the article's own evidence, people kept building larger telescopes - they just put them in better places.