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- Xref: sparky sci.philosophy.tech:4712 sci.med:23693
- Path: sparky!uunet!usc!cs.utexas.edu!news-is-not-mail
- From: turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin)
- Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech,sci.med
- Subject: Inappropriate rejections in science (was: Truzzi Lecture)
- Followup-To: sci.philosophy.tech
- Date: 9 Jan 1993 11:30:50 -0600
- Organization: CS Dept, University of Texas at Austin
- Lines: 64
- Message-ID: <1in24aINNb2f@im4u.cs.utexas.edu>
- References: <1993Jan8.194627.20986@netcom.com>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: im4u.cs.utexas.edu
- Summary: Where are they?
-
- -*----
- Cross-posted and redirected to sci.philosophy.tech.
-
- -*----
- In article <1993Jan8.194627.20986@netcom.com> noring@netcom.com (Jon Noring) writes:
- >
- > Here's an excerpt from Truzzi's lecture which follows in whole, just to give
- > you an idea of its' contents:
-
- I thank Jon Noring for posting this excerpt. All remaining
- single-indent text is from this excerpt, i.e., Truzzi's words,
- not Jon Noring's.
-
- > The history of science is full of some very notable rejections. Some of them
- > are now even silly sounding. Lord Kelvin said that x-rays would prove to be
- > a hoax. Thomas Watson, once chairman of the board of IBM, said in 1943, "I
- > think there is a world market for about five computers". This got so bad
- > that in 1889, Charles Duell, who was then the commissioner of the US Office
- > of Patents, wrote a letter to president McKinley asking him to abolish the
- > Patents Office since "everything that can be invented has been invented".
- > [See note at end of this post for a later clarification of this fact.] Ernst
- > Mach said he could not accept the theory of relativity any more than he could
- > accept the existence of atoms and other such dogmas, as he put it. Edison
- > supposedly said that he saw no commercial future for the light bulb. When
- > the phonograph was first demonstrated at the French Academy of Science, one
- > scientist leaped up, grabbed the exhibitor, started shaking him, and said, "I
- > won't be taken in by your ventriloquist!" Rutherford called atomic power
- > "moonshine". The history of science is full of such crazy stories.
-
- Yes, the history of science *is* full of these crazy stories.
- But I do not think any of these stories illustrates Truzzi's
- point very well. He gives two *marketing* errors (Watson and
- Edison) which might cause a businessman to blush, but that hardly
- reflects on the speakers' practice of *science*. (In fact, these
- errors are notable chiefly because their authors were applied
- scientists whose business acumen was otherwise noted.) He gives
- a (possibly cryptic) quote from a patent official that probably
- had less effect on science then than it does today. And he
- states several errors individual scientists made about particular
- theories or phenomenon that had little effect in slowing their
- general acceptance.
-
- If these are the most serious errors on the side of caution that
- a historian of science can find, then we would have to conclude
- that in terms of rejecting the wild, the practice of science is
- right on track. Personally, I don't believe it. I have no doubt
- that there *are* significant errors of this type, and I think it
- would be interesting to hear some of them as exploration of the
- problem Truzzi describes. But let's be clear about what such an
- error would be. It would be the delay by some decades (or at
- least some years) of the general acceptance in the relevant field
- of a significant piece of knowledge because those in the field
- were too stubborn or too cautious or because the institutions
- concerned were too inflexible.
-
- Does anyone want to volunteer examples? Such errors would be
- particularly interesting in the hard sciences. To avoid
- controversy, it would be best if such proposed errors were ones
- that are now widely recognized as errors. (Those who believe
- that their favorite theory today is an example can take this as
- an historical exercise of looking for the mistakes of
- yesteryear.)
-
- Russell
-