Examples of Science Being Wrong
Important memes for understanding how we need to be humble about our supposed empirical certainty and always question the obvious.
TODO: Add a meme about the Tranquility Drug being used on laboring mothers.
Folksonomies: science pseudoscience mistakes scientific error
Memes
18 JAN 2013
The Story of How the Universe's Size was Determined
It was into this fiery climate of the 1920s that the Protestant-raised Hubble, adorned with the cape, cane, and British accent he had adopted while at Oxford, returned after the war. He arrived at the Carnegie Institution of Washington-funded Mount Wilson Observatory outside Pasadena, California, insisting on being called "Major Hubble."^'' Looking through the great Hooker telescope—at one hundred and one inches in diameter and weighing more than one hundred tons it was by far the largest a...
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Includes a cautionary tale of Shapely, who helped prove the Sun was not the center of the Universe, but who thought the Milky Way was all the Universe there was without empirical data.
17 MAY 2012
Abusing the Evolving Nature of Science to Find Faith
It is unreasonable to expect science to produce a system of ethics—ethics are a kind of highway code for traffic among mankind—and the fact that in physics atoms which were yesterday assumed to be square are now assumed to be round is exploited with unjustified tendentiousness by all who are hungry for faith; so long as physics extends our dominion over nature, these changes ought to be a matter of complete indifference to you. Atoms were once thought square?
31 AUG 2011
An Early Incorrect Assumption About Plate Tectonics
Though the theories of plate tectonics now provide us with a modus operandi, they still seem to me to be a periodic phenomenon. Nothing is world-wide, but everything is episodic. In other words, the history of anyone part of the earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror. That they occur dramatically and infrequently; as opposed to our modern understanding of them being gradual and perpetual.
08 JUL 2011
Looking at babies attentively makes us treat them differe...
Until very recently doctors didn't use analgesia when they operated on small babies, because they thought their minds were too primitive to really feel pain or to remember it if they did. This is a dramatic example, but it often seems as if we discount children's pain compared with adult pain. Child abuse isn't evil because it may produce neurotic adults but because it abuses children. Divorce doesn't have a cost because it may produce adults who have difficulty with relationships but because...Seeing babies as young adults makes us treat them humanely; whereas, in the past, babies were denied analgesia because it was thought that their primitive minds did not sense pain the way an adult's mind did.
19 JUN 2011
Ignoring Inconvenient Truths In Astronomy
Metaphysically speaking, no one paradigm
is innately any better than any other. A universe that began at
9 a.m. on October 10, 4004 B.C. (which was official back in the
seventeenth century) is intrinsically no less valuable for those who
live by a belief in it than is our present uncertain universe, perhaps
built like a yo-yo, forever destroying and remaking itself in
never-ending big bangs. Each of the cosmological theories has, at
different times, found totally ironclad evidence to support ...In order to keep the Earth at the center of the Universe, theologians and astronomers had to come up with wild explanatory theories that did not fit the evidence.
21 MAY 2011
Breast Feeding is Unsanitary
Twenty-six years ago I noticed that our clearheaded, undrugged mothers, who were not strapped down or restrained in any way, eagerly, with mothedy murmurs of joy, reached out to grasp and hold their babies as I placed them on their abdomens. Why not let them hold their babies? I have heard many absurd objections over the years. "The mother's hands and breasts are not sterile!" I personally feel that nonsterility is one of the greatest benefits of breast-feeding. Bacteria are essential to the ...And the bacteria is good for the baby.
01 JAN 2010
Tides Created the Moon
There were tides in the new earth, long before there was an ocean. In response to the pull of the sun the molten liquids of the earth's whole surface rose in tides that rolled unhindered around the globe and only gradually slackened and diminished as the earthly shell cooled, congealed and hardened. Those who believe that the moon is a child of earth say that during an early stage of teh earth's development something happened that caused this rolling, viscid tide to gather speed and momentum ...Folksonomies: falsified hypotheses
Folksonomies: falsified hypotheses
In 1951, the predominant theory on the origin of the moon was that tidal forces on a molten Earth swung a chunk of it off into orbit.
01 JAN 2010
The Continents Don't Move
...the outer portions of the basalt layer became solid and the wandering continents came to rest, frozen in place with the oceans between them. In spite of theories to the contrary, the weight of geologic evidence seems to be that the locations of the major ocean basins and the major continental land masses are today much the same as they have been since a very early period of the earth's history.Folksonomies: falsified hypotheses
Folksonomies: falsified hypotheses
Excerpt from Carson's book, where, in 1951, it was thought the continents are exactly where they have always been since the formation of the earth.
References
08 JAN 2013
Fool Me Twice
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Otto , Shawn Lawrence (2011-10-11), Fool Me Twice, Rodale Press, Retrieved on 2013-01-08Source Material [books.google.com]
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17 MAY 2012
Psycho-analysis and faith
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Freud , Sigmund and Pfister , Oskar (1963), Psycho-analysis and faith, Retrieved on 2012-05-17Source Material [books.google.com]
Folksonomies: psychiatry
Folksonomies: psychiatry
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31 AUG 2011
The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Ager , Derek Victor (1993-03), The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record, John Wiley & Sons Inc, Retrieved on 2011-08-31
Folksonomies: geology
Folksonomies: geology
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06 JUL 2011
The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us A...
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Gopnik , Meltzoff , Kuhl (2001-01-01), The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind, Harper Paperbacks, Retrieved on 2011-07-06
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19 JUN 2011
The Legacy of Science
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book Chapter: Burke, James (1985), The Legacy of Science, Langley Research Center, Washington, DC, Retrieved on 2011-06-19Source Material [history.nasa.gov]
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21 MAY 2011
Husband-Coached Childbirth (Fifth Edition): The Bradley M...
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Bradley , Hathaway , Hathaway , Hathaway (2008-05-20), Husband-Coached Childbirth (Fifth Edition): The Bradley Method of Natural Childbirth, Bantam, Retrieved on 2011-05-21
Folksonomies: pregnancy childbirth
Folksonomies: pregnancy childbirth
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06 APR 2011
The Sea Around Us
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Carson, Rachel L. (1951), The Sea Around Us, Oxford University Press, New York, Retrieved on 2010-11-30
Folksonomies: nature
Folksonomies: nature
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