🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1in24aINNb2f@im4u.cs.utexas.edu>, turpin@cs (Russell Turpin) writes:
>Does anyone want to volunteer examples?  Such errors would be
>particularly interesting in the hard sciences.  To avoid controversy,
>it would be best if such proposed errors were ones that are now
>widely recognized as errors.

The chemical reactivity of the heavier noble (fka inert) gases is
something that anyone could have detected for decades, but didn't
since everyone knew it simply could not happen.  Another case of
bad theoretical thinking was the universal acceptance of Mercury's
rotation period as being the same as its revolution period.  Between
it being extremely difficult to observe and the apparently not
so well-known looseness of periodic data, somebody should have
realized other periods were consistent with the known data before
radar observations.  But the utter simplicity of the 1:1 resonance,
and the lack of interest in Mercury anyway, kept this error alive
for a very long time.

I forget the name of the geologist who spent most of his lifetime (and
he lived quite long) proving that megafloods had occurred in the Pacific
Northwest.  Catastrophism was so anathema that anything that gave off
the slightest whiff of it was ignored.

Meteorites in general have had a hard time gaining acceptance, either
back in the days of proving their existence, or recognizing ancient
hits after the fact.
-- 
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu)