The most surprising scientific failures

Lord Kelvin

The magazine Science News has published an article entitled Here are the 10 ten times scientific imagination failed, either because it fell short, or because it went too far, with respect to what it was logical to imagine. The study begins by quoting Albert Einstein:

Imagination is more important than knowledge... Imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress.

Tom Siegfried, author of the article, adds:

And yet while sometimes spectacularly successful, imagination has also frequently failed in ways that retard the revealing of nature’s secrets. Some minds, it seems, are simply incapable of imagining that there’s more to reality than what they already know.

Then he specifies one by one the 10 cases where, according to him, the imagination of scientists fell short or went too far. This is the list, from most to least important (according to Siegfried):

1. Gravitational waves: Many scientists doubted their existence, or denied that they could be detected. But this is something that happens with practically all theories: until they are verified, there are always some scientists who oppose them. And this is an essential property of the scientific method.
2. Behaviorism: Proposed by John Watson and developed by Skinner, it argued that the brain is a black box that we won’t be able to study. I discussed this theory in another post on this blog. I am not convinced by the reason why Siegfried says he selected this case, because we still know almost nothing about how the brain works.
3. Violation of CP symmetry: Many physicists refused to accept it, because it implies the irreversibility of time, which physicists usually deny despite Eddington's warning. I repeat what I said in the first case.
4. The age of the Earth: In the mid-19th century, Lord Kelvin estimated the age of the Earth at 100 million years. The current figure is 46 times greater. This case should not be on this list. Lord Kelvin cannot be accused of a lack of imagination, because he did the calculations with the data available to him. Today, with more data (the existence of radioactivity and the liquid core of the Earth) we reach other conclusions, but those data were not known when Kelvin made his computation.
5. The practical use of nuclear energy: In 1933, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Ernest Rutherford said this: Anyone saying we can exploit atomic energy is talking moonshine. Fortunately for his prestige, he added this: with our present knowledge. Nuclear fission was not officially discovered until 1938, five years after Rutherford's words.
6. The detection of neutrinos: After Wolfgang Pauli proposed in 1930 the possible existence of the neutrino, in an article published in Nature in 1934, Hans Bethe and Rudolf Peierls concluded that, if the neutrino existed, it wouldn’t interact with matter. In fact, they expressed it thus: There is no practically possible way of observing the neutrino. Twenty years later, Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan detected the neutrino. Reines said that he sought a way to detect the neutrino precisely because everybody had told him it wasn’t possible to detect the neutrino.
7. Nuclear fission: Enrico Fermi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938 for obtaining transuranium elements by bombarding uranium and thorium with slow neutrons. That same year Otto Hahn and his collaborators discovered nuclear fission. It was later learned that the so-called transuraniums discovered by Fermi were actually fission products. Acording to Siegfried, Fermi had little imagination when he chose a novel but incorrect explanation instead of an equally novel but correct one. I think this is debatable.
8. The channels of Mars: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Giovanni Schiaparelli and other astronomers claimed to see straight lines on the surface of Mars (canali, i.e. channels). A translation error from Italian to English caused these canals to be considered artificial, which would indicate that Mars was inhabited by an intelligent species. Astronomers saw and drew maps of the canals until in 1965 the Mariner 4 capsule sent back photographs of the surface of Mars showing that the supposed canals were the product of the imaginations of astronomers.
9. The composition of stars: In 1835, Auguste Comte stated that the composition of the stars would always be an unfathomable mystery. Within a few years, the invention of spectroscopy made it possible to discover their composition. In any case, since Comte was a philosopher and not a scientist, it seems to me that this case should not be on this list.
10. The existence of atoms: At the beginning of the 20th century, Ernst Mach argued that atoms did not really exist: they were useful mental devices, but impossible to detect. We know now that he was wrong.

Enrico Fermi

Everyone can make their own list, but it seems to me that this one is not very successful. There is just one case of an excess of imagination (number 8) compared to nine cases of too little imagination. Issues such as dark matter and dark energy, cosmic inflation and multiverse theories could be additional examples of too much imagination. Furthermore, at least seven of the ten selected cases seem to me quite debatable.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca