There is a tendency for real doctors with backing from Academia or whoever’s in charge of deciding how you science to just plain getting it wrong and not realizing it for a long time.
Homeopathy is a good example of this, as it appeared to get great results when it was created during the Bubonic Plague and had such staying power to the point that in the 1800’s it was considered a legitimate and mainstream field of medical practice.
Now today we know Homeopathy is nonsense… Remembers New Age Healing is still a thing Okay, those of us with sense know homeopathy is garbage. With the only reason it was getting such wonderful results was because the state of medicine for a long period of time in human history was so god awful that not getting any treatment at all was actually the smarter idea. Since Homeopathy is basically just “No medicine at all”, that’s exactly what was happening with its success.
Incidentally this is also why the Christian Science movement (Which was neither Christian nor Science) had so many people behind it, people were genuinely living longer from it because it required people to stop smoking at a time when no one knew smoking killed you.
Anyhow. With that in mind, I want to know if there’s a case where the exact opposite happened.
Where Scientists got together on a subject, said “Wow, only an idiot would believe this. This clearly does not work, can not work, and is totally impossible.”
Only for someone to turn around, throw down research proving that there was no pseudo in this proposed pseudoscience with their finest “Ya know I had to do it 'em” face.
The closest I can think of is how people believed that Germ Theory, the idea that tiny invisible creatures were making us all sick, were the ramblings of a mad man. But that was more a refusal to look at evidence, not having evidence that said “No” that was replaced by better evidence that said “Disregard that, the answer is actually Yes”
Can anyone who sciences for a living instead of merely reading science articles as a hobby and understanding basically only a quarter of them at best tell me if something like that has happened?
Thank you, have a nice day.
Quantum Mechanics: The early concepts of quantum mechanics, such as quantized energy levels and wave-particle duality, were initially met with resistance, even by scientists like Albert Einstein, who helped develop them.
Reason for Rejection: The ideas were counterintuitive and challenged classical physics’ deterministic view, introducing probabilistic interpretations of nature.
Adoption: The overwhelming experimental evidence, such as the photoelectric effect, blackbody radiation, and the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles, eventually led to the acceptance of quantum mechanics as a fundamental framework in physics.
Schrödinger’s cat was also meant as a rejection of quantum mechanics. Something cannot be both a wave and a partical until observed the same way a cat cannot be both alive and dead until observed. However, it does seem like quantum superposition is a reality, making the thought experiment even more bizarre.
For us today it may be surprising, but in 1922, Einstein was not awarded for the Relativity theories (SRT 1905, ART 1915) with the Physics Nobel prise 1921, but for his theory on the explanation of the photoelectric effect (1905), as the theory of relativity was still controversially discussed.
Our professor in quantum chemistry always told the story, that no one believed in it in the beginning and wanted to disprove it. This lead to one of the best tested hypotheses in the field that it is today.