Wrong scientific beliefs that were held for long periods

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge333.html

by muon • 16 years ago

130 109 16 years ago

rubyrescue• 16 years ago

I don't know how "force of gravity" is a wrong belief but "the only force you are actually feeling is the upward force exerted by your own muscles in order to keep your arm accelerating continuously away from a straight path in spacetime." is correct. can anyone explain?

EDIT: my mind is totally blown by this; it put together some pieces of general relativity in a new way for me today. thanks HN!

vibragiel4• 16 years ago

He is saying this because, in general relativity, gravitation is no longer explained as a force between two masses, but as their "warping" of their surrounding space(time).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitation#General_relativity

a-priori2• 16 years ago

This is true, but it doesn't invalidate the description of gravity as being an attractive force between masses. The warping of spacetime is just an explanation of what's happening to create that force.

kscaldef4• 16 years ago

It's the same way that there's not really such a thing as centrifugal force. It a fictitious force that you perceive as a result of being in an accelerating frame of reference.

pbhjpbhj10• 16 years ago

I'm never in an accelerating frame of reference.

When I walk I push the earth around, and drag the universe along with it a little.

michael_nielsen• 16 years ago

The "force" of gravity is not a fundamental concept in general relativity.

Here's a way of thinking about what's going on.

Consider a large mass, like the Earth. That mass curves spacetime in the vicinity of the Earth. A small object, like a satellite, simply moves completely freely in a "straight line" (i.e., geodesic path) according to that curved geometry. The curved geometry is such that those geodesics are just the satellite orbits that we see. In other words, the satellite isn't affected by any "force", it's just moving in a straight line in a geometry that happens to be curved, so we see it doing circles around the Earth.

It's exceedingly neat: in John Wheeler's great phrase, matter tells spacetime how to curve, and spacetime tells matter how to move. No forces required! Of course, after the fact you can tack on a notion of "force", but it's in no way fundamental.

Same thing is going on with projectile motion here on Earth.

Once you internalize this point of view, the statement about holding your arm in place becomes a lot clearer. The "natural" force-free thing your arm wants to do is to move along geodesics of spacetime, which means falling toward the Earth at an acceleration of g. But if we exert a (muscular) force to keep it up, then we can hold it in place. In short, in this point of view, forces are things which cause deviations from geodesic motion.

zach• 16 years ago

As far as simple visual illustrations go, this is the best I've seen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-p8yZYxNGc#t=6m31

iwr3• 16 years ago

While the notion is simple, the math is not.

henrikschroder• 16 years ago

If you are standing on the ground, the only actual force is the normal force of the ground acting on your feet to stop you from falling into the center of the Earth. However, it feels like you are pushing down on the Earth, but that's technically a pseudo-force.

Another way of looking at it is to imagine that you are standing in an elevator in space that is accelerating with the speed of 1g. That scenario will feel exactly the same as if that elevator was standing still on the surface of the Earth, but it's more clear that the elevator is pushing you, and not the other way around.

brockf• 16 years ago

From the article: "I know a union that got a substantial pay raise because a politician did not understand that adding and then subtracting 20% gets you to another result from the one you started."

Wouldn't this be a pay decrease?

x * 1.2 = y

y * 0.8 < x

dkersten• 16 years ago

True. 20% of y is larger than 20% of x (which is what was added to x to obtain y) because y is a larger number. Therefore subtracting 20% of y from y will give you some value smaller than x. Eg: 100 + 20% = 120; 120 - 20% = 96.

Not that anyone here needs an explanation :)

JustinSeriously• 16 years ago

I've been trying to work this one through. One possible solution, (using a hefty dose of mathematical illiteracy, that looks like one of those word problems that occasionally appears in Marilyn vos Savant's column):

  base salary: $100
  $100 * 1.2 = $120
  $120 * (1.2 * .8) = $115.2

("It's a 20% pay cut from our pay raise, that's why you have to multiply our pay raise with our pay cut.")

zb• 16 years ago

Technically he didn't say that it was the pay that was being added and subtracted. Perhaps it could have been something like, say, hours?

ciupicri• 16 years ago

If a sum of money (S0) is increased with p percent then decreased with the same percent, the final sum (S2) will be:

   S2 = S0 * (100+p)/100 * (100-p)/100

A plot[1] of this equation will quickly show that as p increases, S2 decreases.

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28100%2Bp%29%2F100+*+%...

rue• 16 years ago

It would make sense if the amount in question was from a deduction from pay of some sort, tax, union fee deduction etc., rather than the pay itself.

amichail• 16 years ago

The debate as to whether the Earth or sun is the center of the universe was silly. It's all about frames of reference and simplicity of calculations in predicting observations. See "The Grand Design" by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.

Retric2• 16 years ago

People prefer a simplified view of history where people where dumb and ignorant even if it's often proven wrong. The reality is reasonably correct interpretations / ideas are often replaced by misinformation for long periods of time. The most obvious example is how do you lose a city. But, something as simple as crop rotation is often found, then lost then found again.

For a more popular example, two thousand years ago many people thought the earth was round based on a wide range of evidence. They even calculated the size of the earth with a fair amount of precision. A more striking example a scurvy cure was found, then lost and then found again over hundreds of years. http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

Andrew_Quentin3• 16 years ago

Might that not be because people were illiterate and any permanent record was very rare indeed?

Perhaps people were indeed dumb and ignorant. If no one told you all of these things since birth, would you have any idea that the earth goes around the moon. Supposing you are a knight, a farmer, a priest, a whatever, rather than someone dedicating yourself to the study of the stars, and no one told you ever that the earth goes around the sun, or even moves, would you ever find out or know at all and would you not believe the priest or whoever seems to know about the subject.

It is not that people are dumb. They just do not know. A doctor can tell me whatever he likes that sounds reasonable and as I would have no option I would believe him.

yters2• 16 years ago

Based on the literature such as from Plato and Aristotle, it seems ancient people were smarter than we are.

senki• 16 years ago

The worse belief is that science has anything to do with belief. Or, I believe so...

vibragiel4• 16 years ago

I think Edge picked a very bad word. Isn't "scientific belief" is a silly oxymoron?

At least, many of those "beliefs" weren't actually beliefs, but scientific theories that worked very well but were later improved. It's the case of Newtonian gravitational force.

michael_dorfman• 16 years ago

Isn't "scientific belief" is a silly oxymoron?

Not at all. At least, not if you are interested in epistemology. In fact, one common definition of knowledge is "justified true belief." Cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justified_true_belief

siglesias2• 16 years ago

Let the Kuhn v. Popper debates begin...

EDIT: To clarify, using the term "erroneous" under the Kuhnian view (disclaimer, my view), is a bit disingenuous because the criteria under which we are claiming these theories to be wrong did not exist in their historical contexts: on the contrary, some of these theories, such as gravity, happenned to be progressive, brilliant, and in some cases extremely useful as a simplifying framework in the next paradigm. All of the historical and technological ingredients, such as the ability to calculate the speed of light accurately, or Maxwell's equations didn't exist for Newton. Do we call that he missed it an error?

In my opinion, "erroneous" as a term should be reserved for beliefs that were incorrect given existing frameworks: Lamarkian evolution, Einstein's cosmological constant, the postulating of the lumeferious ether, Hilbert's axiomatic program that was disproven in his time by Godel...THESE were erroneous.

It would be like saying in the future when (hypothetically) a more advanced technology comes along and computes a totally revolutionary and paradigm-shifting scientific framework that our views in 2010 are "erroneous". Probably a little extreme.

herdrick• 16 years ago

Aside: it's looking like Lamarck was right.

radu_floricica• 16 years ago

I'd really like some detail on this...

verroq• 16 years ago

>the postulating of the lumeferious ether

Fairly sure that's the just a progressive step towards Einstein's model.

It is difficult to define wrong in a scientific context since everything is just model that matches observations. Of course, as more observations come, models will be naturally disproved. That doesn't mean they were wrong for the entirety of their existence which I think was your point, but you haven't applied it to the examples you raised.

In the example of ether, It was believed to be permeate all matter and the medium for light to travel through. It explained all observations at that time until the Michelson-Morley experiment which settled it.

siglesias2• 16 years ago

I agree that wrong is difficult to define in these contexts, but remember that the only proof of the existence of the ether was that 1) light was thought to be a wave by the mathematical formulation of Maxwell, and 2) all known waves had a physical medium. That's it. It was a very ad hoc construction that immediately presented ways to test it. When it was tested by the MM experiment, it turned out to be undetectable at best, thereby exposing its weakness as a theory. Einstein didn't use the theory as a springboard because it was so good and useful; he used it as a springboard because it was so bad.

jpablo• 16 years ago

Very relevant here is Isaac Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong:

http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1147968

baddox• 16 years ago

The belief that Earth was flat only existed up until around eight thousand years ago, before the institution of anything you could call "science," so I don't even think that one should count.

KaeseEs• 16 years ago

I was really disappointed to see that sort of thing mentioned; I had been hoping for better, more wild-goose-chase-y examples where the wrong hypothesis was compelling and consistent with equations that accurately modeled reality - things like the luminiferous ether, which yielded the accurate Lorentz equations, and the caloric theory of heat which yielded many accurate equations and experimental results (indeed, its fluid model of heat is so parallel to reality that you probably recall your mechanical engineer friends at school taking "thermals and fluids" classes). The Earth being flat was debunked the first time someone saw a boat come in to pier and is thoroughly uninteresting.

Natsu• 16 years ago

Well, what about the notion of a fixed earth around which other things rotate? Granted, this gets fuzzy about how wrong it is when you consider that there's no absolute reference frame, but if you read history, you'll find out that the reason they couldn't believe that the earth was moving was that they could not measure the stellar parallax. In other words, they knew that the stars should appear to shift a little if the earth was moving. Yes, they do in fact shift, but they're so many light years away that it took a long time before anyone came up with anything that could measure it.

jessriedel3• 16 years ago

I think you're wrong here. It's true that it's a myth that scholars in Columbus's time thought the earth was round, but the sphericity of the earth was certainly was not known for the past eight thousand years worldwide, nor was it even common knowledge among non-scholars in Columbus's time (as evidenced by the fact that artistic depictions of a flat earth were common).

Wikipedia:

> The Flat Earth model is a view that the Earth's shape is a flat plane or disk. Most pre-modern cultures have had conceptions of a flat Earth, including ancient Greece until the classical period, the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Ancient Near East until the Hellenistic period, Ancient India until the Gupta period (early centuries AD) and China until the 17th century. It was also typically held in the cultures of the New World until the time of European contact, and a flat Earth domed by the firmament in the shape of an inverted bowl is common in pre-scientific societies.[1] The paradigm of a spherical Earth was developed in ancient Greek astronomy, beginning with Pythagoras (6th century BC), although most Pre-Socratics retained the flat Earth model. Aristotle accepted the spherical shape of the Earth on empirical grounds around 330 BC, and knowledge of the spherical Earth gradually began to spread beyond the Hellenistic world from then on.[2][3][4][5] The misconception that educated people at the time of Columbus believed in a flat Earth has been referred to as "The Myth of the Flat Earth".[6] In 1945, it was listed by the Historical Association (of Britain) as the second of 20 in a pamphlet on common errors in history

philwelch4• 16 years ago

A "meta-myth": the myth is that knowledgable people believed in a flat earth, not the flat earth belief itself.

pbhjpbhj10• 16 years ago

>The belief that Earth was flat only existed up until around eight thousand years ago, [...]

Can you give your evidence for this assertion?

I think this is a modern interpretation as an attempt to demonstrate that we are somehow advanced beings now. IMO the person of 8000 years ago was probably as capable as the modern man, given the same nutrition and with the same access to reference works and technology I don't think we would outshine them generally. Quite possibly the opposite.

ottbot• 16 years ago

No mention of the incorrect theories of flight/lift, which are or were very common.

Here is a good summary: http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/wrong1.html

Estragon• 16 years ago

Dirichlet used the ~4000 B.c. date for the creation of the Earth in one of his examples of statistical inference. Not sure whether that counts as believing it, though.

J3L2404• 16 years ago

The belief in an "Luminiferous aether" for the transmission of radio waves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether

adolph• 16 years ago

I think that one of the interesting threads between contributors to this is the general expression of empathy and consideration for those who espoused or worked towards ideas that were later proven mistaken. An example is Charles Simonyi:

I think we are all too fast to label old theories "wrong" and with this we weaken the science of today — people say — with some justification from the facts as given to them — that since the old "right" is now "wrong" the "right" of today might be also tainted. I do not believe this — today's "right" is just fine, because yesterday's "wrong" was also much more nuanced "more right" that we are often led to believe.

j_baker• 16 years ago

I like this one. It almost seems to be a contradict our current education system:

"Among cognitive psychologists, there is widespread agreement that people learn best when they are actively engaged with a topic, have to actively problem solve, as we would put it 'construct meaning.' Yet, among individuals young and old, all over the world, there is a view that is incredibly difficult to dislodge. To wit: Education involves a transmission of knowledge/information from someone who is bigger and older (often called 'the sage on the stage') to someone who is shorter, younger, and lacks that knowledge/information. No matter how many constructivist examples and arguments are marshaled, this view — which I consider a misconception — bounces back. And it seems to be held equally by young and old, by individuals who succeeded in school as well as by individuals who failed miserably.

Now this is not a scientific misconception in the sense of flat earth or six days of creation, but it is an example of a conception that is extraordinarily robust, even though almost no one who has studied cognition seriously believes it hold water.

Let me take this opportunity to express my appreciation for your many contributions to our current thinking."

dkarl2• 16 years ago

That one sounds rather argumentative. He's taking conventional wisdom about learning (active engagement, problem solving) that is accepted dogma among practicing teachers (at least in U.S. primary and secondary schools) and trying to paint it as a minority view. Without hearing some evidence for the robustness of the "transmission" idea, I'm tempted to dismiss this as a rhetorical trick. I suspect there are some popular classroom practices he disagrees with, and he's trying to stigmatize them by linking them to an old, discredited idea.

johnzabroski• 16 years ago

U.S. primary and secondary schools do not accept the constructivist school as dogma. Perhaps you have simply misunderstood the differences he was stressing.

For more information on this, you should probably look at what Seymour Papert has been doing in Maine lately.

yters2• 16 years ago

Anecdotally, I'd concur with the author. Most of my education seemed irrelevant. I learned to program and understand math because I wanted to make computer games.

glhaynes• 16 years ago

"people learn best when they are actively engaged with a topic"

"Education involves a transmission of knowledge/information from someone who is bigger and older"

These seem mostly orthogonal to me... the latter just being a generalization of (anecdotal) experience.

A_A• 16 years ago

Some of my favorite "wrong" or erroneous 'beliefs' (apart from the Flat Earth, and geo-centric beliefs)

-- Luminiferous ether: that light propagates via the "ether" medium -- "Bad air" theory of infectious diseases (which is still held in many countries) -- "Stress causes ulcers" -- Leprosy is contagious -- The belief that first five (or two, or three) years of a child's life determine his/her personality in adulthood. This is one is still widely held and accepted.

Oh, and just for kicks: 'Intelligent Design' and its variants. :-)

And just to throw it out: What will it take to convince that Global Warming / Climate Change is real? This is perhaps one of the leading least-understood / most controversial beliefs of our times.

iwr3• 16 years ago

Leprosy is slightly contagious, but significant over very long exposures.

ranprieur• 16 years ago

I wonder what beliefs we have now that will be ridiculed in 500 years.

Avshalom• 16 years ago

I don't know about ridiculed but once quantum gravity gets sorted out there is a good chance that either relativity or quantum mechanics is going to be "wrong" in the sense the Newtonian sense of "inaccurate at X scale."

davidj2• 16 years ago

Look at my comment with -4 at the very bottom, already being ridiculed right now :)

kadavy2• 16 years ago

I like this one:

> Among cognitive psychologists, there is widespread agreement that people learn best when they are actively engaged with a topic, have to actively problem solve, as we would put it 'construct meaning.' Yet, among individuals young and old, all over the world, there is a view that is incredibly difficult to dislodge. To wit: Education involves a transmission of knowledge/information from someone who is bigger and older (often called 'the sage on the stage') to someone who is shorter, younger, and lacks that knowledge/information. No matter how many constructivist examples and arguments are marshaled, this view — which I consider a misconception — bounces back. And it seems to be held equally by young and old, by individuals who succeeded in school as well as by individuals who failed miserably.

arethuza4• 16 years ago

My maths is pretty rusty but... I think describing Euclidean Geometry as wrong is a bit harsh - it's just the system you get when you treat the Parallel Postulate as axiomatic.

If you allow variation in this area you get Elliptical/Hyperbolic geometries - but these extend Euclidean Geometry, they don't invalidate it.

lkrubner• 16 years ago

"Wrong" might overstate it, but certainly, for a long time Euclidean Geometry was thought to be a statement about an absolute truth that existed in the Universe. There could be no other geometry. Recall the shock and dismay with which the educated public first heard about hyperbolic geometry. If math is always true, they wondered, then how could another geometry exist alongside Euclidean Geometry? It was as if reality had been disproven. It took a long time for the educated public to come round to the view that we could have multiple geometries, each true for certain given assumptions.

arethuza4• 16 years ago

That is, of course, correct - but surely that is more how Euclidean Geometry was interpreted rather than there actually being an internal problem with Euclidean Geometry.

kadavy2• 16 years ago

> that a person who became fat through overeating would thereby have fat children

I believe this is actually true. It's called epigenetics, & there was a great StuffYouShouldKnow Podcast about it: http://castroller.com/podcasts/StuffYouShould/1687893-Can%20...

evandijk70• 16 years ago

One belief that wasn't mentioned is the idea of phlogiston. It's the idea that flammable material contains a substance called phlogiston and that the escaping of that substance is equivalent to burning. This believe was held for around a hundred years, from the end of the seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth century

jodrellblank• 16 years ago

Wave function collapse? http://lesswrong.com/lw/q7/if_manyworlds_had_come_first/

(I don't understand it, but I like it).

mcritz3• 16 years ago

I’m shocked that none of the experts mentioned any of widely-held Eastern “scientific beliefs” in dietary supplements, herbal remedies, or reflexology.

These are still commonly practiced yet are scientifically proven no more effective than a placebo.

khafra• 16 years ago

Many herbs are pharmacologically active, to the point of being dangerous if taken in conjunction with OTC or prescription medication. Rhino horn and reflexology do seem to belong in the "bogus belief" category.

mcritz3• 16 years ago

Exactly! Peyote, aspirin, cannabis, et cetera are real drugs. Most herbs are not active. Some herbs can even worsen the condition they are traditionally used to treat.

Andrew_Quentin3• 16 years ago

If they are dangerous, they might, or at least some of them might, be beneficial no?

iwr3• 16 years ago

The idea that medieval people believed in a flat Earth is not true. The shape and approximate size of the Earth was knowm since ancient times (3rd century BC).

Columbus was not turned down at first because people believed he'd fall off the edge of the Earth; they knew he could not have possibly reached Asia, the distance was too great. It was only pure luck (finding America) that saved him. A venture capitalist in those times would have been rational not to buy into the expedition.

As for geocentrism, that has some merits. But note that Ptolemy and his followers were really hindered by a lack of good astronomical data. Using methods of those times, an epicyclical model of the planets was pretty accurate and could have been refined further. The model of Copernicus was deemed superior because it needed fewer epicycles to make the math right. The breakthrough came only after Kepler got the very accurate Huygens observations (taken over 20 years); after he had enough datapoints, he could come up with his famous laws.

And so, let's not blame the Ancients right away. They were not as ignorant as we may believe.

fhars• 16 years ago

Reasonable people thought that the ocean (without america, there would be no separate atlantic and pacific ocean) was considerably smaller than it really is, not least due to the impossibility to reliably measure longitude, so they vastly overestimated the east-west extension of eurasia. Just look at the globes Behaim made in 1491-1493 (based on data by Pope Sixtus IV) which shows a really small ocean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Behaim#The_Erdapfel

According to the best contemporary data, the investment would have been highly speculative (as all voyages across the sea), but not insanely so.

brc2• 16 years ago

Maybe the flat earth theory was invoked as a polite way of telling Columbus no. In the same way that many investors never say no, they often say 'not right now'. The story must have had a kernel of truth to grow from.

grandalf• 16 years ago

The problem doesn't have to do with human rationality, but has to do with human subservience to authority.

davidj2• 16 years ago

Hell I can give you currently held beliefs that I can prove wrong: Global Warming: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5576670191369613647 Big Bang: http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/bang.php Floride is good for you: http://www.fluoridealert.org/health/accidents/acute.html Mercury is good for you: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a910652305~... Keynesian Economics : ..Just look at the dollar index.

Evgeny• 16 years ago

Many (but not all) scientists assumed the far side of the moon would turn out to look much the same as the side we are familiar with. [...] And I argued with Hornig [Donald Hornig, Chairman of the President's Science Advisory Committee] about it and he said, 'Why? It looks just like this side.' And it turned out it didn't."

I did not know that. How significant is the difference?

zephyrfalcon• 16 years ago

See for example http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/clementine/images/

esp. http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/clementine/images/img...

brc2• 16 years ago

Reading through the list, it shows just what a high standard any current theory must be held to, given the amount of past failures in what are fundamental understandings of the world we inhabit.

joshcrews• 16 years ago

This is a great reminder to have skepticism and humility about current scientific beliefs that are so widely accepted they are axioms today.

jeffreymcmanus• 16 years ago

It's interesting that "stress causes ulcers" keeps coming up again and again, this one is clearly a favorite among a lot of scientists.

known• 16 years ago

One more is God == Religion

Wrong scientific beliefs that were held for long periods

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