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- Path: sparky!uunet!gatech!udel!darwin.sura.net!jvnc.net!newsserver.jvnc.net!netnews.upenn.edu!sagi.wistar.upenn.edu
- From: weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
- Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
- Subject: Re: Inappropriate rejections in science (was: Truzzi Lecture)
- Message-ID: <104225@netnews.upenn.edu>
- Date: 10 Jan 93 19:23:36 GMT
- References: <1993Jan8.194627.20986@netcom.com> <1in24aINNb2f@im4u.cs.utexas.edu>
- Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu
- Reply-To: weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
- Organization: The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology
- Lines: 28
- Nntp-Posting-Host: sagi.wistar.upenn.edu
- In-reply-to: turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin)
-
- In article <1in24aINNb2f@im4u.cs.utexas.edu>, turpin@cs (Russell Turpin) writes:
- >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.
-
- The chemical reactivity of the heavier noble (fka inert) gases is
- something that anyone could have detected for decades, but didn't
- since everyone knew it simply could not happen. Another case of
- bad theoretical thinking was the universal acceptance of Mercury's
- rotation period as being the same as its revolution period. Between
- it being extremely difficult to observe and the apparently not
- so well-known looseness of periodic data, somebody should have
- realized other periods were consistent with the known data before
- radar observations. But the utter simplicity of the 1:1 resonance,
- and the lack of interest in Mercury anyway, kept this error alive
- for a very long time.
-
- I forget the name of the geologist who spent most of his lifetime (and
- he lived quite long) proving that megafloods had occurred in the Pacific
- Northwest. Catastrophism was so anathema that anything that gave off
- the slightest whiff of it was ignored.
-
- Meteorites in general have had a hard time gaining acceptance, either
- back in the days of proving their existence, or recognizing ancient
- hits after the fact.
- --
- -Matthew P Wiener (weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu)
-