Anything from left field make it to mainstream?

Nereid

Several folk in posts in this sub-forum have said that it's important to allow 'a hundred flowers to bloom' - let's be open to all ideas and inputs, at least initially, because you never know which one among these may just turn out to be the discovery of the millenium - or words to that effect.

So I got to thinking (yes, it hurts), how many things from left field have made it to mainstream, in the last 50 or 100 years?

Not many, was what I thought immediately. I mean, apart from sprites (here's a link to an older report, so you can get a flavour of how odd they once seemed: http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/sprites.html), what is there? And sprites were hardly a phenomenon which the UFO crowd had at the top of their list of hard evidence (were they?); it was more long-haul pilots!

So, casting the net wide, wide to begin with, what left-fielder has made it to mainstream?

Ivan Seeking

First, although you are not quoting me [I don't think], I do support the general idea. I think the more relevant question is: How much of present day science was anticipated?

As for your question:
How about the PC for starters? [developed in a garage]
The gilled mammals of Asia.
Ceolocanth
Great apes
Anti gravity [dark energy]
Mission to the moon
Wrist watch computers [Dick Tracy]
Ray guns
Giant Squid
High efficiency discharge style motors [developed in a garage]
Einstein

Just a few off the top of my head.


Also, no; the UFO people could not tell sprites from other claims. Why you ask. Because if people like pilots reported them, due to the dismissive attitude of many scientists towards things they can't explain, the pilots were subject to ridicule and possible career damage. To anyone who takes the time to investigate this stuff, this becomes abundantly clear. The airline companies don't like pilots who see funny things. So what few were reports were made remainded as relatively un-investigated UFO reports.

Jonathan

mathematical formulation of universal laws
telephone
airplane
tv
radio
hell, all of electronics

The fact is, everything someone might point out as being a great triumph of science happened, in fact, in spite of it. I can't think of a single massive discovery that wasn't done by an outsider. Einstien was hardly in the loop, he only worked at a patent office. Newton was weird, not really a people person. Cavendish was afraid of women, he had to leave notes to his maids/servants (he couldn't talk to them directly) and only left the house for a walk to the royal society meetings. The fact is that the moment you go for a real career in science you will never discover anything of consecquence. (Sure, there was Feynman, but how many joe blows know his name? NONE!) Someone smart once said something to the effect of: 'If someone (esp. an 'expert') tells you something, it's generally true, unless they used the word impossible in the sentence, at which point their arrogance is showing.'

Ivan Seeking

I have another great example somewhere in the UFO Napster; I didn't spot it on first try. Back in 1965 [or so] some great 8mm film of a UFO was shot. Since it was labeled a UFO - which as you know is supposed to mean unidentified and not taken as a substitution for ET - the film was largely ignored. Only in recent years did scientists realize that this is film of a near miss with a significantly large meteor.

Ivan Seeking

Animal sensitivity to seismic precursors

Animal sensitivity to human health problems

Dophins used to treat severe autism

On another note:
Hydrogen as an alternative energy carrier:
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthr...&threadid=4127

And some recent example from the political forum:

Here is a wild one that I just picked up from the fringe. Be sure to read the entire thread.
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthr...&threadid=6830

Agent Orange:
http://www.appc1.va.gov/opa/fact/docs/agentorangefs.htm


Oh yes. Global warming and most other environmental issues.

Claims that Vietnam was an unjust war [that we shouldn't be fighting].

Watergate.

Njorl

How about the idea that there is no luminiferous ether? That was considered bizarre in its day.

Njorl

Ivan Seeking

I was told by a Berkeley man [always suspect [:D]], that SR was developed without knowledge of the Michelson - Morley experiment. Do you know if this is true?

Jonathan

I doubt it. One another note, I've always wondered about the MM experiment. I heard one theory that matter is like vorticies in a fluid, and the the aether is this fluid. The aether flows in, and apparently pops out of existence, and it is continually created at some rate everywhere. From this theory, it was said that gravity is a push force resulting from this influx and that light bends near massive objects the same way that a boat doesn't follow a straight line when going spanwise in a moving river (except of course this is oversimplified, because that river would have to be unidirectional only on small scales, but when you zoom out you see that is is flowing to the center of the massive body, like ripples going backward in time). This does explain the null result, because the aether flow would then perpetually be normal (perpendicular) to the surface the experiment is on. Does anyone know if they've tried a vertical MM experiment? I think this is the gist of the theory, it's from a guy in Norway, so his English is so-so. If you guys are interested, PM me, I'll send you the website.

Ivan Seeking

Why?

zoobyshoe

Whoaaa! Hold the presses!
You may have just answered something that's been eating at me since I picked up the Patent-Man's ramblings a few weeks ago and tried to read through them.
If you get out your copy of SR and turn to chapter VIII On The Idea Of Time In Physics, you will find on the third page: "That light requires the same time to traverse the path A to M as for the path B to M is in reality neither a supposition nor a hypothesis about the physical nature of light, but a stipulation which I can make of my own freewill in order to arrive at a definition of simultaneity." (AM and BM are equal distances, M is the centerpoint between A and B)

Now, I read that over and over, scratching my head wondering why on earth he felt it was necessary to stipulate that light traveled at the same speed no matter which way it was going. If your informant is correct, Ivan, I will have found my answer.

Jonathan

Ivan Seeking: Why: I don't know, just don't. Weird, huh?.
I think Zoobyshoe proved me wrong.

selfAdjoint

This is called isotropy, and Einstein did have to postulate it because his other new postulate (in addition to Galilean relativity which was old) was that the speed of light did not depend on the speed of its source. With that and Galileo you need isotropy to reach a complete consistent theory.

Modern axiomatic development of special relativity uses galilean relativity and a different new postulate. That all inertial observers measure the speed of light to be the same. Since one can imagine inertial observers (= moving without acceleration) that move in any direction, therefore this new postulate includes isotropy inside it. So those two postulates, instead of Einstein's three, is what we use today.

On the subject of Einstein and the Michelson-Morley experiment, he spoke with forked tongue. In an early interview he said he didn't know about M-M when he developed the theory. Years later, in a speech in Japan, he said he did.

zoobyshoe

What is to be made of this discrepancy?

The way he wrote it, as I quoted, seems just about definitely to prove he wasn't aware of it. A demonstrated fact need not be stipulated, postulated, or proposed. If you have a copy of SR and read the whole passage he makes quite a big point about this issue, as if in evasion of a reader objecting to anything like an assumption light was constant. Had he known it was a demonstrated fact he could simply have said so, stated who had demonstrated it for the reader who didn't know, and proceeded to use it. (As he did with the Lorentz Transformations).

selfAdjoint

All of the proposed left field successes are pathetic. Science fiction isn't proposing things as hidden reality (not even the Matrix, folks) it's entertainment. The coelacanth was not predicted by Madam Blavatsky, it was caught by fishermen. An empirical fact, and one no longer a mystery. Einstein was a trained scientist working on an existing field (Maxwellian electromagnetics as developed by Lorntz). And so on.

The real left field is spirit raps, seances, higher planes, fairies, ghost hunters, esp, remote viewing and so on. Two hundred years of "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'. And the upshot? Has even one of these topics become mainstream?

zoobyshoe

This is true. There is a difference between "left field" and what might be called "the margins", (eg: Einstein who wasn't employed in the mainstream of academia.)

FZ+

Faraday's vision of the interaction between electricity and magnetism. (Though today's interpretation has significantly less mysticism, since we understand EM more.)

Chaos theory.

zoobyshoe

I'm not sure what you're talking about, Fz+. Faraday had a mystical interpretation of this?


I have been reading about Chaos since you introduced me to it in another thread. Although it could be easily said to have come from the margins, I haven't found any "left field" precursors.