Examples of accepted theories once rejected?

[thenewmans]

Can any of you think of examples of physics theories that were at one time rejected by the scientific establishment but later were accepted? Can you beat these examples?

• Heliocentrism (Galileo in particular) - I don’t count this since he was primarily rejected by less scientific groups.
• Newton says light is a particle – I don’t count this since Newton didn’t present a testable theory.

 

[arunma]

Well, one example that comes to my mind is dark energy, the supposed impetus behind the accelerating expansion of the universe. Einstein created the fudge factor in his solutions to the Einstein Equations that came to be known as the cosmological constant. This was later rejected, but has now come back with the spicier name "dark energy."

 

[matthyaouw]

Plate tectonics/continental drift. Proposed in the early C20th, but it wasn't until the '50s and '60s that ocean exploration led to the evidence to confirm it.

 

[thenewmans]

I'll have to research Einstein's cosmological constant because I thought the only reason he through that in is because he thought that the universe size couldn't change. So the constant counteracts expansion. Dark energy is a cosmological constant but it's repulsive and causes expansion.

Tectonics, I like that. I didn't know it had been rejected by science at one point. I see that in Wikipedia so far.

I'm starting to think Heliocentrism is not such a bad example. I found that scientists at the time insisted that we would get blown right off the planet if we whipped around the sun at a thousand miles an hour.

 

[Redbelly98]

This wasn't actually a new theory, but the idea that a relativistic object would appear to be rotated, rather than simply contracted, was not realized until James Terrell figured it out in the mid-to-late 1950's. Half a century after Einstein's 1905 paper!

EDIT: Terrell had a lot of trouble convincing other physicists of this.

 

[tribdog]

I'll have to research Einstein's cosmological constant because I thought the only reason he through that in is because he thought that the universe size couldn't change. So the constant counteracts expansion. Dark energy is a cosmological constant but it's repulsive and causes expansion.
.

the cosmological constant of einstein was repulsive. It counteracted gravity. Depending on its value it could have caused expansion. It wasn't put there simply to keep everything static. It was put there to stop everything from crunching together.

 

[thenewmans]

Thanks Tribdog. That makes sence.

 

[tribdog]

hopefully its correct then.

 

[Pythagorean]

not sure if this qualifies, but Bose with Bosons

most of the scientific community thought he was making mistakes in his paper to arrive at his conclusion (ironically, a mistake was what inspired him)

It wasn't until Einstein read his ideas that they gained credibility.

This was a rather short period of rejection, though.

 

[tribdog]

How about Darwin? It's still being rejected even though its correct.

 

[Pythagorean]

the world is round... that one was in... then out... now it's back in.

(along with the hollow Earth society)

 

[Pythagorean]

How about Darwin? It's still being rejected even though its correct.

by the scientific community?

 

[tribdog]

Christian Science

 

[CaptainQuasar]

I read somewhere that the 19th century theory of http://books.google.com/books?id=VMwKAAAAYAAJ&printsec=titlepage#PPA56,M1", which I have no understanding of but I gather is sort of an equivalent of string theory in that it tries to address some of the discrepancies caused by particles being singularities in the models of mainstream physics. (So like string theory twistor theory is entirely unproven.)

^† Direct citation to an 1880 issue of Nature. Do I win some kind of prize for Most Ancient Journal Citation Ever on PF?

⚛​

 

[CaptainQuasar]

Newton says light is a particle – I don’t count this since Newton didn’t present a testable theory.

Wasn't that corpuscular optics? Surely it can count a little bit. But I thought it originated with some Italian monk or something, not Newton.

⚛​

 

[Office_Shredder]

Newton's theory of light as a particle was considered to be true, not rejected, for quite a while until people got sick of it not explaining things like diffraction.

 

[Hurkyl]

• Newton says light is a particle – I don’t count this since Newton didn’t present a testable theory.

I don't count this because the current theory of light doesn't resemble Newton's ideas, except at this very superficial level. Saying that Newton had thought up the modern theory of light is like saying Democritus thought up the modern atomic theory!

 

[Vanadium 50]

Continental drift is perhaps the best example. Even then, I am not so sure how good an example it is, as the flaws pointed out were essentially correct. Plate tectonics was a much better and more inclusive theory, and while it also predicted continental motion, it was rather dissimilar to Wegner's theory.

Yang-Mills theory is an interesting example: it was proposed and rejected as a way to explain the strong nuclear interaction, but it turned out to explain the weak nuclear interaction. Right answer - wrong question.

 

[Redbelly98]

• Newton says light is a particle – I don’t count this since Newton didn’t present a testable theory.

Another problem: light was exclusively a particle, and not a wave, in this thinking.

 

[jambaugh]

Christian Science

He asked for scientific theories not religious dogmas. Putting "science" in the name doesn't make it science. The discipline of empirical epistemology makes it science.

 

[Pythagorean]

Another problem: light was exclusively a particle, and not a wave, in this thinking.

The nature of light in the eyes of man has taken quite a trip.

Pre-Newton - Light as a wave (forgot who was responsible for this mostly)
Newton - 17th century - light as particles
Young - 19th century - light as wave
Bose - 20th century - light is made up of photons, which are bosons, which are neither particles nor waves in the classical sense.

 

[jambaugh]

The nature of light in the eyes of man has taken quite a trip.

Pre-Newton - Light as a wave (forgot who was responsible for this mostly)
Newton - 17th century - light as particles
Young - 19th century - light as wave
Bose - 20th century - light is made up of photons, which are bosons, which are neither particles nor waves in the classical sense.

It was my understanding that Newton understood from interference (e.g. Newton's rings) that light was a wave and the different colors were a function of the different wavelengths.

 

[Pythagorean]

It was my understanding that Newton understood from interference (e.g. Newton's rings) that light was a wave and the different colors were a function of the different wavelengths.

Yes, he did that too, but his idea was that it was a particle and that the wave effect had to do with the particle moving through the aether (Back when the aether was legit)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light#Particle_theory

in some sense, he may have been the first scientist open the possibility of it being both in some sense; don't know what the social stigma with admitting that would have been, though.

 

[Vid]

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

Almost all of the established physicists of his time rejected and refused to acknowledge his atomic approach to physics using statistical mechanics. He eventually got tired of defending his theories and just hung himself.

 

[Pythagorean]

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

Almost all of the established physicists of his time rejected and refused to acknowledge his atomic approach to physics using statistical mechanics. He eventually got tired of defending his theories and just hung himself.

didn't somebody right after him (like his apprentice) kill themselves too? I remember that being the introduction to a thermodynamics textbook.

 

[thenewmans]

Wow, I love all the responses. I like the Boltzmann story. Now I’d like to up the game. I’m looking for science accepted today that was considered absolute quackery at first. I don’t think we’ve gotten close to this yet.

Here’s why I ask. After an argument on pseudoscience, I got into a good discussion of how to recognize when science is going wrong. There are lots of examples of that although there are fewer in physics. I’d call those false negatives (type II) and I proposed that there are plenty of false positives (type I) as well. My first attempts were acupuncture, meditation and many traditional medicines. I could only think of health or life science examples and I’d like to find a few examples in physics, chemistry and math.