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):

The nature of the physical world

Arthur Eddington

The Nature of the Physical World is the title of a landmark work in the history of popular science. Published in 1928, it compiles the Gifford lectures given in Edinburgh by its author, Arthur Eddington, in 1927. Eddington was then famous, having been the scientist who, in 1919, on the occasion of a solar eclipse, organized the expedition that proved one of the predictions from Einstein's theory of General Relativity: the deflection of light when passing near a star. It was said of him that he was one of only three people in the entire world who understood General Relativity. In addition to this, Eddington was a pioneer researching on the origin of the energy of stars, for he was the first to propose that it came from the fusion of hydrogen to form helium.

The limits of physics

There are two kinds of limits in scientific research:

1.      Theoretical or intrinsic limits: when these limits exist, no matter how many scientific discoveries may be made in the future, they won’t be exceeded.

2.      Practical limits: they appear when, in theory, a problem can have a solution, but there are practical reasons that make it impossible, at least for the time being. In these cases, we cannot affirm that the problem won’t be solved in the future.

Sometimes we don’t know if a given limit is theoretical or practical. In these cases, what will happen in the future is open. If the limit turns out to be theoretical, it will never be exceeded. If it is practical, it will be exceeded if our technical capabilities exceed the technical needs for its resolution, being possible that this will never happen. Take, as an example, the inherently difficult math problems I mentioned in the previous post.