I’m thinking of things like heliocentrism where there was some modern discovery or revelation by science that invalidated a common assumption prior.
My understanding is that flat earth is more a recent phenomena but I’d love to hear some ancient ideas people now miss. Did people think trees weren’t alive? Did people think evaporation was where things simply disappeared?
I’d would love to hear these ideas.
Ignaz Semmelweis tried to convince the medical establishment that washing hand stop’the spread of disease in hospitals. His colleagues responded that doctors are gentlemen and gentlempdo not have dirty hands. Semmelweis was committed to a mental institution soon after and died from an infection as a result of a beoti’he received from institution workers. A few decades later the four humors school of medicine was replaced with diseases caused by microorganisms.
Imagine living at a time when the germ theory of disease wasn’t widely accepted. You might even need to convince people that microbes exist. If they already know about microbes, they might believe that microbes spawn out of thin air through abiogenesis. Previously that word was used when talking about microbes spoiling food whereas nowadays it’s applied to the early stages of the earth.
Not exactly a scientific debate, but among the general public there was strong opposition to the idea that rocket engines would work in space, where there’s “nothing to push against.” Famously, the New York Times editorial board mocked Robert Goddard (the rocket scientist that now has a NASA space flight center named after him) in a 1920 article:
“That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react — to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”
The New York Times eventually formally retracted that op ed, on July 17th, 1969 - while the Apollo 11 crew was already en route to the moon. The retraction is pretty funny:
Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.
Goddard wasn’t just another rocket scientist, he was the inventor of the liquid fuel rocket! And he also made a ton of other key discoveries about rocket design that formed the groundwork for rocketry as we know it today.
“‘There was some wonderful stuff about [railway trains] too in the U.S., that women’s bodies were not designed to go at 50 miles an hour. Our uteruses would fly out of our bodies as they were accelerated to that speed.’” From: https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-TEB-2814
There were (and are) a ton of utterly ridiculous beliefs about what can cause harm to women, but I find this one particularly amusing in an age where millions of women fly on planes. Imagine the plane takes off, leaving all those wayward uteri spinning in the dust at the gate…
In my mental image, the spinning uteri danced before feinting dramatically. Unexpected.
Some beliefs along these lines have been used more recently in extremely religious places like Saudi Arabia.
"If a woman drives a car, not out of pure necessity, that could have negative physiological impacts as functional and physiological medical studies show that it automatically affects the ovaries and pushes the pelvis upwards,” …
“That is why we find those who regularly drive have children with clinical problems of varying degrees,”
From 2013, a cleric’s arguments to deny Saudi women the right to drive
Thankfully the ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia was lifted in June 2018, but it took a lot to get there.
This isn’t exactly a ‘science debate’ but I’ve met several people that still think the ‘Great Wall is the only man made object visible from orbit.’ I read somewhere that may come from a dream some Chinese king had like 1000 years ago.
Almost crazier than flat-Earth in terms of being easily disprovable just by thinking about it for 20 seconds, but people have stated that to me as a fact and were kind of incensed when I explain it’s obvious nonsense.
Personal favorite is probably Lamarckian Inheritance. Feels like super buff people having wimpy ass babies would key people in that acquired traits weren’t being passed on.
But it’s also the textbook example of how science progresses even when the underlying model being used is incorrect. Darwin credited Lamarck for suggesting a potential mechanism for evolution. Works prior to Mendel were direct tests to Lamarckism. Mendel responded to those, and on and on it goes. Lamarck helped push the field along and that’s great.
Side note, people like to say epigenetics is a continuation of Lamarckism but I’d disagree completely. Heritability of traits is what is important here, and epigenetic marks don’t necessarily tag the genes that contribute to the traits themselves.