Can anyone name great blunders of scientists?

Answer 1

There are plenty of blunders of science.

Ptolemy thought the sun went around the earth and also the planets.

Aristotle thought that that the idea of atoms was absurd.

Galileo thought that tides were due to the winds and developed an elaborate theory to explain tides being caused by winds.

Thomas Hobbes thought that a vacuum was impossible and argued against Boyle's Law of gases.

Claude Berthollet, the guy who discovered bleach, thought the modern atomic theory of John Dalton and the experimental results of Antoine Lavoisier were incorrect because of Claude's poor experimental skills and poor equipment.

Joseph Priestley thought there was a substance called phlogiston that explained why things burned. Even though he discovered oxygen he just thought it was dephlogistonated air.

The quack sciences of Eugenics and Lysenko Biology that were popular in the 1930s are examples of the corruption that happens when you force science to conform to political ideologies. A similar thing is happening in the USA under Bush's allowing Christian fundamentalists to dictate science projects from NIH to NASA. Fortunately, they are being universally rejected for their fraud.

Currently "String Theory" is turning out to be a great blunder of theoretical physics as it has produced no testable hypothesis.

Science will also make mistakes but, unlike religion that pretends its erroneous ideas come from God, science can correct its mistakes and move on.

Answer 2

There have been a few notable ones, but I'd like to point out that many scientists were skeptical of the initial results from the beginning - science is self-correcting, so mistakes don't last too long.

1) The Piltdown Man - a fake skeleton of a prehistoric man that had people fooled for over a decade. Fortunately, we have plenty of real skeletons of prehistoric man - the guy above who said Darwin was wrong is completely wrong himself.

2) N-Rays - a new kind of light wave 'discovered' at the university in Nancy, France. Quickly debunked when it was found that the discoverer couldn't tell the difference between a functional N-ray detector and a non-functional one.

3) Cold Fusion - the idea that fusion (which releases enormous amounts of energy) can take place at room temperature (instead of 15 million K, as it does in the Sun). Hyped by a group at some state university - Nevada or Idaho or something - but they were found to be faking their data. It doesn't work.

4) The guy who invented Chloroflourocarbons was the same guy who thought it would be a great idea to put lead in gasoline. He single-handedly has done more to hurt the environment than anyone else ever.

Answer 3

Science is not so much filled with blunders as it is changeable. Early knowledge is accepted with the caveat that things can change, that understanding can improve. Current knowledge is treated the same way, whether the disclipline is medicine, physics, cosmology - this is the best knowledge we have at this point, but future discoveries may, and probably will, improve and clarify our current knowledge. That's also why science is not a belief - evolution is not a belief - but an understanding.
A hundred fifty years ago, physicians thought whiskey a potent, even lifesaving, stimulus. Over the years, we've come to recognize this isn't so.. Was that 150-year-old attitude a blunder? No, it was a misunderstanding that was corrected only through bettering our understanding of biochemistry and physiology. We aren't born knowing everything, after all. So: there's no point in talking about "blunders", there's only the point that we should continue to investigate, to study and to test, meanwhile applying current knowledge to human problems. To fail to use current knowledge just because future studies may make today's facts irrelevant is a serious mistake. You play the cards you're dealt; it's the only way to stay in the game.

Answer 4

To my humble knowledge, good science can't make a mistake because every statement in good science is preceeded by the statement, "As far as we have yet to observ and given the limited nature of our knowledge, the following is true...."

But arrogant science has made some hillarious mistakes:

1) It used to be thought that the GOrilla was a myth, and the same with the Panda bear.

2) The fossil record showed 100% and still does show 100% that the Neoglyphea neocaledonica, a type of shrimp, went extinct 50 million years ago; and this was widely believed. Oceanography shows they live today in the waters of Australia.

3) The fossil record shows that the Coelacanth went extinct 10 million years before dinosaurs, and this was widely believed. Nobody told them, and they live near Indonesia.

4) THere was a hominid named Hesperopithecus which was believed to be an early ancestor of man found in Nebraska. He turned out to be based on regular pig bones.

5) In the early 1960s Polywater was discovered in Russia by Dr. Derjaguin by forcing rgular water through ultra narrow quart tubes. The result was water which boiled at a much higher temperature, froze at a lower temperature, and was so viscous it couldn't be used by living tissue for hydration. He published a paper, and others began experiment with polywater. Eventually, some scientists began warning that if poly water came into contact with regular water it could turn regular water into polywater. If it would get into the ocean, it could destroy the world.

It turned out it was just dirty water forced through tubes.This was discovered in 1969.

Answer 5

These aren't actually great, but quite amusing.
Early explorers to New Guinea collected bird of paradise skins from the locals. The locals removed the legs because they didn't look great in a headdress, and the scientists named the genus Apoda, meaning legless, and believed these birds actually lived without legs. Due to the laws of nomenclature, birds of paradise are still Apoda.
The green tree frog is called Littoria caerulia, meaning blue tree frog. The first specimens to arrive in England from Australia came preserved in alcohol, which changes colours sometimes..
The first platypus specimen to arrive from Australia was dismissed as a fraud, someone even thought they could see the stitchmarks where the beak had been sewn on..

Answer 6

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge... The 1940's version that collapsed due to oscillation generated by wind. It is probably the most famous engineering failure.
(Be sure to watch the video on the PBS link)

NASA's launch of a myoptic Hubble Space Telescope was a classic Goof.

Answer 7

Einstien, in devolping his theory of relativity, could not accept the idea that the universe is expanding...even though the math of his theory said otherwise.

So he added a "cosmological constant" to his equations to make them come out "right" and show that the universe is pretty much the same now as it has always been...and will always be.

Einstien later called it his "greatest mistake"

Answer 8

This probably isn't a great one, nor much of a blunder, but I always think of it:

Einstein's theory of relativity -> creation of the atom bomb

I know Einstein didn't realize nor create the atom bomb, but his theory laid the ground work for Szilard to come up with it.

Answer 9

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Answer 10

Probably the most memorable one to me was Alexander Graham Bell spilling acid and inadvertantly creating the telephone.