The Major Blunders That Held Back Progress in Modern Astronomy
From the post:
Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. ”
The history of science provides many entertaining examples. So today, Abraham Loeb at Harvard University in Cambridge, scour the history books for examples from the world of astronomy.
It turns out that the history of astronomy is littered with ideas that once seemed incontrovertibly right and yet later proved to be bizarrely wrong. Not least among these are the ancient ideas that the Earth is flat and at the centre of the universe.
But there is no shortage of others from the modern era. “A very common flaw of astronomers is to believe that they know the truth even when data is scarce,” says Loeb.
To make his point, Loeb has compiled a list of ten modern examples of ideas that were not only wrong but also significantly held back progress in astronomy “causing unnecessary delays in finding the truth”.
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Highly amusing account of how “beliefs” in science can delay scientific progress. Three in this essay with pointers to the other seven (7).
When someone says: “This is science/scientific…,” they are claiming to have followed the practices of scientific “rhetoric,” that is how to construct a scientific argument.
Whether a scientific argument is correct or not, is an entirely separate question.