"Yup. History is replete with respected experts who fell down the rabbit hole of their own ideas."
Classic UK
engineering example remains Prof. Laithwaite, of linear-motor fame, later haplessly enthralled by the behaviour of big fly-wheels and gyroscopes. He really, really thought he'd stumbled upon contra-gravitic route. Disgrace and medical retirement ensued...
IIRC, there's a Nobel Prize winner who later 'got a bee in his bonnet' about mega-vitamins preventing Cancer. Also, that Doc who went from Hero to
sub-zero over the MMR combined vaccine. His anti-triple-vaxx efforts have now spawned global out-breaks of all three so-preventable lurgies...
'Wooden Spoon' perhaps due for Razer's N95 anti-COVID masks...
“Deceptive advertising and misinformation posed a risk to public health."
arstechnica.com
Sometimes scientists get stuck in a problem and have no choice but to use their creativity to imagine concepts that justify their theories, although they call it
theoretical physics that sounds better.
In 1869 Dmitri Mendeleev had the 'inspiration' of creating a farsighted version of the periodic table of elements leaving gaps for some elements still unknown but of predictable properties. He was lucky and when they were discovered, between 1874 and 1886, he became a hero.
In 1930 Wolfgang Pauli 'invented' a particle called
Neutrino as a desperate remedy to explain an incomprehensible phenomenon named
Beta disintegration, knowing that perhaps its existence could never be experimentally proven. But he got lucky and the
Neutrino was officially discovered in 1956.
In 1984 a physicist of the Berkeley University named Richard Mueller imagined the existence of
Nemesis, a dark star orbiting at 16,000,000,000 kilometers around the Sun, to explain certain orbital alterations experienced by Uranus and Neptune. But so far, he has not had any luck.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, science became stuck again because the established paradigm of the
Standard Model of Particle Physics was unable to explain the
Dark Matter, the
Dark Energy, the
Gravitational Quantum State, and the
Cosmological Constant phenomena. The theoretical physicists have been formulating models on the
String Theory that are impossible to demonstrate because this would require amounts of energy that exceed the available technology.
Science or faith?
In 2018 Sabine Hossenfelder of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, published the book ‘Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray’. Sabine argues that the
theoretical physicists have lost the North. We have not seen a major breakthrough in the foundations of physics for more than four decades. Paucity of major advances in fundamental physics is partly due to an overemphasis on aesthetic criteria such as symmetry and mathematical beauty, in the face of their inability to overcome the new challenges posed to science.
In 1453, while the Turks shelled the walls of Constantinople with 1,054 mm heavy artillery, Byzantine theologians were debating the sex of angels instead of defending the fortress. They ended badly.
thedebrief.org
www.nextbigfuture.com
