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.
Continental drift or just the idea that the continents move. And it makes sense, looking at a map of the earth, you can clearly see that some landmasses look like they fit together like puzzle pieces. Combined with the fossil record with also supported this, it seems obvious to us now, the continents were once all one landmass. However, back then, the issue was Alfred Wegener, who came up with continental drift, didn’t have an adequate mechanism for how it worked. The question on everyone’s mind was, if the continents moved, HOW did they move? There wasn’t a good answer. It was suggested at one point that the continents maybe just plowed through the ocean crust. But that idea doesn’t work because the ocean crust is too rigid. So without any mechanism to get it to work, many geologists simply dismissed the idea. And to be fair to them, most of what Wegener claimed was indeed wrong.
Further advancements in geology and technology allowed for a better understanding of the earth. A key finding was paleomagnetic stripes on the ocean floor which proved that the earth’s crust, and the continents must be moving. This, combined with other evidence helped construct the modern theory of plate tectonics.
Pretty wild to me that it took as late as it did to figure out spontaneous generation wasn’t real.
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…
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.
In my mental image, the spinning uteri danced before feinting dramatically. Unexpected.
The funny thing about heliocentrism is, that isn’t really the modern view either. The modern view is that there are no privileged reference frames, and heliocentrism and geocentrisms are just questions of reference frame. You can construct consistent physical models from either, and for example, you’ll probably use a geocentric model if you’re gonna launch a satellite.
But another fun one is the so-called discovery of oxygen, which is really about what’s going on with fire. Before Lavoisier, the dominant belief was that fire is the release of phlogiston. What discredited this was the discovery of materials that get heavier when burned.
Not any kind of expert, but this seems wrong to me. My understanding is that heliocentrism vs geocentrism is about the whole solar system, ie: the same frame of reference.
So if you were launching a satellite, yes, you would use earth as your reference point but that is NOT geocentrism. You would never use a geocentric model. Ever. Not these days anyway.
Again though, I’m not an expert so maybe don’t take this as law
You’re absolutely right. Heliocentrism and geocentrism aren’t “questions of reference frame”, they’re cosmological models.
Nobody is using a geocentric model when they launch satellites, as any geocentric model that works with our existing observations of the universe ultimately does not have a functional understanding of gravity. And it will be remarkably difficult to keep a satellite in orbit if you disagree with the universe about how gravity works.
