Favourite Missteps in Scientific History

[Mr. Dictator]

Here's mine.

The Phlogiston Theory, haha.

 

[Swedishguy]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_elements_%28Chinese_philosophy)

The chinese elements, hahaha.

 

[Maimonides]

I think it was called phrenology. The study of the bumps on someone's head. Practitioners thought they could deduct all sorts of information from the bumps on someone's head.

 

[carlosMM]

The 'theory' that large dinosaurs had to be ectotherm, water-living monsters. Dumb ones.


Why? Cause it gives me something to do

 

[Mr. Dictator]

The 'theory' that large dinosaurs had to be ectotherm, water-living monsters. Dumb ones.


Why? Cause it gives me something to do

I once had a teacher tell me that no dinosaurs ever lived in the water.

Yay for TN edumucation!

 

[Leifmk]

I think it was called phrenology. The study of the bumps on someone's head. Practitioners thought they could deduct all sorts of information from the bumps on someone's head.

But it gave us retrophrenology; the practical method of modifying someone's behaviour, personality and mental attributes by altering the bumps on their head. You can see for yourself that it works; just try hitting someone on the head with a hammer, and you can be sure his behaviour will be modified. Fine control over the outcome is still a bit difficult, however.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

Piltdown Man. A little different in that it was a deliberate hoax on someone's part, but enough people believed it for it to count.

 

[Perfection]

Here's mine.

The Phlogiston Theory, haha.

Actually phlogiston theory was a step in the right direction, it managed to unify a bunch of different interellated phenomena under a single header.

 

[thetrooper]

Cold Fusion!

 

[Sidhe]

The Demon of Lorentz, The Ether, debunked by Einstein in his theories of relativity, sometimes though you get the impression that ether theory is being reinvented under another name when you read about higgs fields and so on,space is curved? How can you curve nothing? Anyway it's a pretty foolish notion to believe we're surrounded by some primordial ooze through which we travel. Er hold on what about vacuum energy? What about the Kasimir effect? Agggggggghhhhhhhhh away from me you demon Aether. My favourite foolish or maybe not completely foolish notion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_ether_theory

 

[classical_hero]

Embryonic Recapitulation. This is a clear case of someone faking drawing and passing them of as real.

 

[QuoVadisNation]

By far, my absolute favorite is Hegel's conception of the "soul" being manifested in corporal bodily parts.

Central to Hegel's conception of knowledge and mind (and therefore also of reality) was the notion of identity in difference, that is that mind externalizes itself in various forms and objects that stand outside of it or opposed to it, and that, through recognizing itself in them, is "with itself" in these external manifestations, so that they are at one and the same time mind and other-than-mind. This notion of identity in difference, which is intimately bound up with his conception of contradiction and negativity, is a principal feature differentiating Hegel's thought from that of other philosophers.

There was one incident in Britain where a religious and devout construction worker had a nail struck into his brain. He, somehow, survived but became a quick apostate afterwards. Religious 'scientists' then cited the above Hegelian thought claiming the nail "damaged the soul"; ergo proving the soul did indeed exist.

Don't get me wrong! Hegel is a cool philosopher, but many of his 'scientific evaluations' were utterly unfounded. And created some of the stupidest sciences of the 19th century.

 

[PrinceOfLeigh]

The Scientific Racism of the 1800's.

Black people being intellectually inferior due to the size of their genitalia or people with large foreheads being criminals.

 

[El_Machinae]

Hysteria, especially of old. The Wiki doesn't mention it, but a treatment used to be to hang the woman upside down until she calmed down.

The term originates with the Greek medical term, hysterikos. This referred to a medical condition, thought to be particular to women, caused by disturbances of the uterus, hystera in Greek. The term hysteria was coined by Hippocrates, who thought that the cause of hysteria was due to the uterus wandering around the body in search of children. The same general definition, or under the name female hysteria, came into widespread use in the middle and late 19th century to describe what is today generally considered to be sexual dissatisfaction.[2] Typical "treatment" was massage of the patient's genitalia by the physician and later vibrators or water sprays to cause orgasm.[

 

[Sidhe]

Hysteria, especially of old. The Wiki doesn't mention it, but a treatment used to be to hang the woman upside down until she calmed down.

Yeah I like the second treatment, was that to relieve the guys sexual frustration or the womans

 

[Raisin Bran]

Wasen't the discovery of penicilin a misshab?

 

[Masquerouge]

Well I have to say the old cosmogonies are a good laugh. Yeah, the Earth is flat, surrounded by water, and the Sun revolves around it.

 

[CartesianFart]

Descartes's Pineal Gland.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pineal-gland/

Aristotle's assumption that change and decay does not go beyond the sublunuary sphere.

 

[Sidhe]

Wasen't the discovery of penicilin a misshab?

Yeah two students of Alexander Flemming left there results out over night by mistake and when they came in in the morning they found that a mysterious mould had grown on the culture, and even more surprising it had killed the vast majority of there bacterial samples, they reported this to their mentor et voila penecillin.

 

[warpus]

Luminiferous aether FTFW