The best scientific theories (that later turned out to be wrong)

Science can contradict itself. And that's OK. It's a fundamental part of how research works. But from what I've seen, it's also one of the hardest parts for the general public to understand. When an old theory dies, it's not because scientists have lied to us and can't be trusted. In fact, exactly the opposite. Those little deaths are casualties of the process of fumbling our way towards Truth*.

Of course, even after the pulse has stopped, the dead can be pretty interesting. Granted, I'm biased. I like dead things enough to have earned a university degree in the sort of anthropology that revolves around exactly that. But I'm not alone. A recent article at the Edge Foundation website asked a broad swath of scientists and thinkers to name their favorite long-held theory, which later turned out to be dead wrong. The responses turn up all sorts of fascinating mistakes of science history—from the supposed stupidity of birds, to the idea that certain, separate parts of the brain controlled nothing but motor and visual skills.

One of my favorites: The idea that complex, urban societies didn't exist in Pre-Columbian Costa Rica, and other areas south of the Maya heartland. In reality, the cities were always there. I took you on a tour of one last January. It's just that the people who lived there built with wood and thatch, rather than stone. The bulk of the structures decayed over time, and what was left was easy to miss, if you were narrowly focused on looking for giant pyramids.

What's your favorite dead theory?

The Edge: Wrong Scientific Beliefs That Were Held for Long Periods of Time

*Likewise, just because some ideas have turned out to be wrong doesn't mean it's safe to assume all the scientific truths we hold today will be disproved somewhere down the line.

We've spent several hundred years now carefully collecting data about our lives, our planet, and the wider Universe. But we don't have all the information. Sometimes, new research comes in and confirms our previous picture of reality, and sometimes it doesn't. It's not random. It's often easy to see how facts are stacking up and get a good idea of likely reality even when you don't yet have all the pieces perfectly in place. But the point is: You can't generalize.

Image: The cover of Laurie Anderson's 1982 album Big Science, as photographed by kevindooley. Some rights reserved.

• [Chaoskitten]

  My favouritest ever is that the universe was created by a god in a week, and he’s spent the time since just kind of kicking back and watching his little mechanism run. (Newton)

• [LX]

  How about the idea that mankind had some sort of identical built-in rules, like Kant’s Categorical Imperative, even though it would prevent known things like Cannibalism, etc. There are still people out there trying to prove this stupid idea.

  • [Ugly Canuck]

    It appears that some such rules operate at the level of language acquisition and use, if not a moral level.

    The rules which describe and govern biochemical reactions also operate identically throughout all human individuals.

    • [Ugly Canuck]

      Bah. “if not AT a moral level”, in my comment #20 above.

  • [Ugly Canuck]

    Really, properly speaking, Kant was promulgating a moral theory, rather than a scientific one, wouldn’t you say?

• [Eric Hunting]

  One of my favorites is the Aquatic Ape theory. It paints such an idyllic picture of ancient proto-humans living like pods of dolphins, and then they messed it all up not by coming down from the trees but out of the water.

• [Anonymous]

  I miss the idea of pole shifts, the notion that the off-center ice at the south pole enhances the Earth’s natural wobble until the planet capsizes and places the poles at the equator in a matter of hours. (The “pivot points” will be the only 2 relatively safe places on Earth). The idea was promoted by Hugh Auchinchloss Brown in “Cataclysms of the Earth,” which was the basis for the novel “The HAB Theory” by Allan W. Eckert. Now we have crustal displacement, which gives us NO safe places!

• [Anonymous]

  Certain, separate parts of the brain controlled nothing but motor and visual skills.

  Wait a minute…. that’s incorrect? That’s what I’ve believed all these years.

  Shows how little I know about the brain. I’d better read up.

  • [Anonymous]

    ‘separate parts of the brain controlled nothing but motor and visual skills.’
    That one made me ponder since there actually are parts of the brain that are specifically involved with motor skills and other with visual skills, typically primary motor cortex and primary visual cortex. However those brain parts are connected to associative cortices and stuff and information processing goes back and forth.

    Actually what was told in the EDGE comment by CHRISTIAN KEYSERS is not that specialised motor and visual brain areas do not exist but that some neurons (labelled as ‘mirror’ neurons) in other areas that those primary cortices were identified as responding similarly when a monkey performed an action and saw an operator perform the same goal-oriented action.

    The funny part is that this discovery – which as said in the EDGE comment challenged the theories linking action to perception – proved quite popular and led to a whole lot of enthusiastic extrapolations (mirror neurons as basis for everything from romantic love to financial crisis), on which skepticism would have to be applied now.

    Thinking about this and other situations such as when genetic mapping was thought to solve everything, I wonder how much people jumping on a new experimental result or concept to force it into whatever gap lies in their own constructs could create or stabilise wrong beliefs.

• [CitizenKang]

  The “wandering womb” theory.

  “Ancient doctors believed that the womb could move about in a woman’s body, putting pressure on other organs and so causing serious illness, and even death… Tells about Egyptian beliefs of 1900 B.C.: a woman who was unwell was said to be “womby”… How could such diseases of the womb be cured?”

  http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1996/02/26/1996_02_26_194_TNY_CARDS_000373322#ixzz16GXULmMd

  This, from Wikipedia:

  “Plato’s dialogue Timaeus tells of the uterus wandering throughout a woman’s body, strangling the victim as it reaches the chest and causing disease. This theory is the source of the name, which stems from the Greek cognate of uterus, hystera (ὑστέρα).”

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

• [Jexy6]

  This post is a Cracked.com writer’s dream!

  I can see it now: “The top 7 scientific theories (that were later proven false)”

• [Anonymous]

  I like how Newton’s theory of gravity is “wrong” because it gives a good opportunity to explain about approximations and the scientific process.

  • [Truthism]

    The 4th one is gravity, because it’s an approximation. By that logic, all scientific theories but 2 are already wrong, and those 2 are guaranteed to be proved wrong eventually. So scientific theories are always wrong. Darn.

    • [Ugly Canuck]

      Guaranteed by whom?

• [Anonymous]

  I like how some of the writers speculate on why the false theories gained such traction, and why people couldn’t think outside the box enough to reject them.

  A good mental exercise would be to take today’s accepted theories and do the same thing. If we see things that fall into the same pattern, maybe there’s something we should investigate further?

• [Anonymous]

  The response from George Lakoff (bottom of the page) is fantastic. Dude is a genius of the highest order, and the implications of what he covers in his response will be the foundation of a new social understanding, once we get it through our thick skulls.

  To sum up his response: Enlightened thinking and Rationality fail to describe what we now know about human thought and behavior in pretty much every way.

  • [Ugly Canuck]

    Anon #28: What distinguishes Lakoff’s claimed (yet un-evidenced, at least by Lakoff) “massive failures of enlightenment reason” from regular, non-massive failures?

    And in what way is “enlightenment reason” a statement of reality, a scientific proposition capable of experimental proof, such that it is which is capable of being called a “false theory”.

    In other words, “enlightenment reason” is NOT, itself, a scientific theory.
    IMHO, Prof. Lakoff does not know what he’s talking about.

    • [Ugly Canuck]

      Is Prof. Lakoff suggesting that we are to judge the quality of scientific work not by applying our reason to it, but by our emotional response to it?

    • [Ugly Canuck]

      Enlightenment reason: where do you find such in nature anyhow?

      By what measurements is it known, or its effects evidenced?

      “Enlightenment reason” is not a scientific theory, but a political one, as it has ever been: and Lakoff is not making an argument about science and the validity of its specific theories: but trying to argue politics, on the basis that “science” PROVES his political opinion to be correct.

      But I’d like to know what the theory of enlightenment reason predicts, not what it claims: for a scientific theory makes predictions as to the measurable shape of nature.

      I don’t think that “enlightenment reason” is itself a “scientific theory”, so as to be falsifiable, or to be even capable of being called “proven” or “dis-proven”.

      As a concept, it does not itself bear those qualifiers. It is a method of thought: not a scientific theory of thought.

• [rps13]

  My favorite example is illustrated very nicely by many of the responses to the question: the notion that we have solved the problem and have the ANSWER. How many of the theories offered by those scientists as the right answer or explanation will be proven wrong (or at least incomplete) in 10, 20, or 50 years?

  • [djn]

    Heh, that’s the negative way of seeing it. :)

    Most of the taken-as-good-but-since-disproved theories were ultimately dropped because they made wrong predictions. However, many of them had value in that they were often right – the typical example is Newtonian physics. It would be silly to disregard it at the time, even though it was not ultimately the final answer to how things act.

    Much the same goes for the theories of today – there will probably be cases where they don’t work, and they will eventually (hopefully) be replaced by something that explains those cases. However, they work so well for so much, that right now it would be silly to not accept them as useful explanations.

    And I think it’s fine if scientists are proud of that.

    • [rps13]

      Absolutely. I’m not criticizing the scientific process or saying that the work today’s scientists are doing isn’t incredibly valuable, just pointing out the importance of perspective and humility.

      • [Jonathan Badger]

        Humility is of no worth to any ambitious person in any field, whether it is science, business, or art. Nobody gets ahead by constantly second-guessing themselves; any worthwhile advance will get more than enough criticism from competitors as it is. (As do missteps that aren’t advances; the gauntlet of criticism filters those out). But without pride, nobody would put their reputation on the line for anything. Pride is good!

        • [Ugly Canuck]

          Pride goeth before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.

          Proverbs 16:18

          http://bible.cc/proverbs/16-18.htm

• [Anonymous]

  In the 1970′s, the FORCE was part of everything in the universe, and by tapping into it could be used for good or evil. 20 years later the Force is “created” by manipulating midichlorians, a microorganism in all living things that are connected together.

• [Anonymous]

  Maggie:
  It’s not about scientists lying or not, but about an incredible lack of humility. Scientists are often wrong, but they are hardly ever in doubt about their findings — only other people’s findings. Part of the problem comes from the combative atmosphere we have set up in our universities. On the one hand, models and theories need to be challenged, but on the other hand individual scientists get caught up in the defence of their ideas and often have difficulty distancing themselves from their object of study, or considering that they may be wrong. It is even worse in industry where huge financial pressure is thrown into the mix and a scientist admitting that an idea can be wrong would cost millions.

  After decades of persevering through the university system, the only thing I can say is that true wisdom is always linked to humility, and the higher up you go in the scientific pyramid (generally) the more humility you find. The number of science undergraduates and graduates who enter the world thinking they have the secrets of the universe all tied up never ceases to depress me. What’s sadder is the number of mid-level academics who have the same arrogance.

  In my career I have been lucky enough to collaborate with some at the very pinnacle of the pyramid, Nobel prize winners and those who are real leaders in their fields, and am always so astounded by their humility and sense of awe and wonder before the universe. These are guys who know how to hold ideas lightly, and know just how much we don’t understand. Sadly, for the vast majority of my scientific peers (and I probably have my days, too), most of the time is spent in sound and fury, and arrogance.

  • [Ugly Canuck]

    Anon #29: Oh, don’t be so down on yourself or your colleagues – you scientist guys are but rarely great monsters of ego, avarice and ambition.

• [penguinchris]

  I’m late to the commenting party as usual, but having been trained as a scientist myself I can’t resist. In the course of my studies I’ve frequently come across old publications – both books and articles – and they’re usually quite fascinating.

  My field is geology, and consider this: most of what we now hold to be correct about geology is a result of the acceptance of plate tectonic theory – which happened around *1970*!

  Before that, there were countless wild theories about just about every aspect of geology. And what’s great is that geology is a field where artistic depictions of land forms, the earth’s structure, and so on are frequent and necessary for clarity in publications. Some great stuff to be found in old geology books in your local university library.

• [Anonymous]

  I would think that an understanding of how often theories and explanations have later proven (If that is possible) to be wrong would eliminate some of the snobbery that we have in our own thinking. ecobore has proven me wrong on that with one simple comment about the middle US. Ever hear of Purdue U. Notre Dame U. Two highly regarded scientific research institutions located in the Middle US. I am sure that the research that comes out of those two places and others will not effect his theories because of their location more than their research.

• [bugmaker]

  Electrostatic cosmology makes so much more sense than current cosmological theory.

• [James Ph. Kotsybar]

  OBSERVING OBSERVERS
  – James Ph. Kotsybar

  Per perceiving predilection’s effect,
  researchers search precautions
  to assure that their constructed theories
  won’t be wrecked by accredited critics
  who abjure results
  from lax experimentation which
  funnels too few affecting factors.
  Scientists’ psyches lack isolation –
  all audiences are also actors.
  Objectivity varies
  with the minds involved
  whose realities rarely budge;
  what one expects to see
  is what one finds.
  One must watch “blind”
  to impartially judge –
  so data’s distinct
  from observations which
  bind to belief’s anticipations.

  SURVIVAL OF THE WITLESS
  — James Ph. Kotsybar

  When fire, water, earth and air were thought
  to be the elementals that composed
  all matter, folks did not become distraught
  at what avant-garde chemists then proposed.

  Most understand that our world is a sphere
  (with only one natural satellite);
  no matter where folks sail they do not fear
  they’ll reach Earth’s edge and fall into the night.

  Most even have embraced that time’s not fixed
  and have adopted relativity.
  So why should folks’ beliefs remain so mixed
  about evolution’s activity?

  Abundant evidence supports this view,
  yet institutions argue it’s not true.

• [Smoobly]

  None of those theories were wrong, per se. They were–like the theories that replaced them–explanations of the way the world works. People look at the world, and devise explanations to describe the mechanisms of what they observe. There are always anomalies, but if they’re small enough, and/or the explanation is sufficiently compelling, it’s accepted.

  Later, others make more observations that the theory fails to explain, and somebody has to come up with a new theory. Sometimes they revise or revamp the old one; sometimes they replace it wholesale.

  Neither the old theory nor the new one is Right or Wrong. The new one is merely provides a better explanation of the now-expanded observations.

  • [Ugly Canuck]

    That’s right, it is an incremental process: and the process goes on and on and on, and over the centuries, the science does seem to have gotten better.

• [Anonymous]

  My favorite is this 1937 prediction that ten years or more may be added to man’s life by drinking heavy water. This was the prediction of Dr. James E. Kendall, head of the chemistry department at Edinburgh University. The idea was that heavy water, containing the heavy hydrogen atom, has the same effect on the body as lowering its temperature without actually doing so. It would slow functional processes, reducing bodily wear and tear without appreciably impairing man’s faculties. Dr. Kendall believed that people over 60-years-old would soon drink heavy water to slow the pace of life and to prolong it.

• [Marcel]

  Is this still about that WiFi thingie?! I thought we were through this?

  The trees died.

• [S2]

  Saw Lamarckism up above; can’t really fully enjoy it without its contemporary, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” (Although maybe it plays at a cultural/political level? Compare today’s reactionary USAian denial of evolution in favor of intelligient design to old USSRian Lysenkoism….)

• [CrowCall]

  There are some great comments on that EDGE forum. I especially like Howard Gardner’s thrashing of the conventional view of how people learn:

  …among individuals young and old, all over the world, there is a view that is incredibly difficult to dislodge. To wit: [Good, successful e]ducation 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. … [This] is an example of a conception that is extraordinarily robust, even though almost no one who has studied cognition seriously believes it holds water.

  In fact, Gardner notes, “people learn best when they are actively engaged with a topic, have to actively problem solve, [and have to,] as we would put it, ‘construct meaning.’ ”

  On another note, we should remember that “wrong” is a contextually sensitive notion. For instance, there is nothing “wrong” with Ptolemaic geocentrism if your goal, say, is to predict where Mars will be three months hence, or to predict the next solar eclipse. It works just fine, as it did for some 1500 years. And it is not entirely dead, either–with all due respect to Copernicus and Galileo, modern-day courses in airplane navigation regularly adopt an Earth-centered approach, in which our planet is fixed in place, neither rotating nor revolving, and everything else in the sky moves around it. In this context, geocentrism is simpler and more effective–that is to say, right–for the task at hand.

  The same goes for a majority of the “theories” (or, more accurately, ideas and beliefs) that are mentioned in the EDGE forum. They may be wrong by modern standards, but they are hardly wrong in any eternal, ultimate sense.

  Rightness or wrongness is rarely–if ever–an absolute attribute. It is determined by context. People who believe otherwise are (ahem!) wrong.

  • [redsquares]

    That’s beautiful.

    To tie in with Anon#29, science should not be a finger-pointing exercise, it’s to be a test of accuracy, proper analogy, and consistency. Which is (perhaps, maybe) how the brain works, go figure.

    We are working to build a set of analogies which do not conflict in anyway with the outside system. It’s important that incorrect theories are made, otherwise there wouldn’t be anything to test and theorize otherwise. Without failure, no progress can be made.

    So, stop with the dualist nonsense, it gets us nowhere.

  • [Ugly Canuck]

    Nice to see a pragmatic view expressed.

    • [CrowCall]

      Fellow (pragmatic) traveller?

  • [Bill Beaty]

    > Rightness or wrongness is rarely–if ever–an absolute attribute. It is determined by context. People who believe otherwise are (ahem!) wrong.

    Right and wrong. :) Just beware of thinking that “if it’s relative, that means it’s not really wrong.” If a belief prevents further learning, or leads to serious misconceptions, we can tag it as “wrong,” even if the same belief might not cause trouble in other situations.

• [Urban Garlic]

  Years ago I picked up “Buckmaster’s Encyclopedia of Physics” (or it might have been “Science”), a handbook of scientific explanations from the early 1900s.

  The book pre-dates the discovery of radioactivity, and they have a heck of a time trying to explain what could possibly power the Sun. They have a pretty good idea about the rate at which it emits energy, and they can compute how fast it should be shrinking if the energy is derived purely from self-gravitation, and they’ve been observing it long enough and precisely enough to know that it’s not shrinking fast enough for that to be right — indeed, as far as they can tell it’s not shrinking at all — so they know there must be another source of energy. Their best guess (well acknowledged in the book as being a guess) is that possibly unseen meteorites are constantly bombarding the Sun, and replenishing its energy.

  It’s a nice object lesson in how confusing things can be when you’re missing a bit of the puzzle.

• [speedreeder]

  Phrenology is my favorite, Phrenology was the study of the size and shape of the skull, phrenologists believed that a person’s skull could determine their personality and any mental problems.

  In regard to earlier comments about scientists, they’re human like everybody else. They’re subject to the same personality quirks as everybody else.

  • [Sparrow]

    I still practise active phrenology, by adding bumps to people’s heads with a hammer.

• [grikdog]

  Those phony “how a bug sees” montages of n identical images in n hexagonal frames. Since the discovery that a mammal’s retina and a bug’s ommatidia arise from the exact same gene, the analysis of vision in honeybees and dragonflies, e.g., has gotten vastly more sophisticated.

  For example, dragonfly eyes correlate speed, distance and motion 10x faster than any mammal. Not even B. F. Skinner, with his quack reflexology, considered that one, since the dragonfly is clearly processing information, not just eliciting “stimulus-response reactions” from its environment!

• [adamrice]

  Some of Larry Niven’s earlier books mention the then-current theory that the only reason the Earth doesn’t have a Venus-like environment is because we have a large moon gravitationally stripping away the excess atmosphere. I think this theory went out of style in the 70s.

• [pwilliam56]

  We must be ever cautious of our certainty, as a wise man once pointed out:

  The man who is certain he is right is almost sure to be wrong, and he has the additional misfortune of inevitably remaining so. All our theories are fixed upon uncertain data and all of them want alteration and support. Ever since the world began opinion has changed with the progress of things and it is something more than absurd to suppose that we have a sure claim to perfection…
  — Michael Faraday

• [-v-]

  I’m partial to the phlogiston theory:

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

  Basically, before oxygen was discovered,(and for some considerable time thereafter) it was thought that there was a special element, phlogiston, which had negative mass, and was released when things burned or rusted; that was how you could explain that things gained mass when they burned or rusted. It was a bit like returning to having fire as an element. It held until Lavoisier was able to do some very careful measurements of both the air things burned in and the things he burned that the theory was discarded.

• [nixiebunny]

  Darn it! I was gonna say phlogiston as well.

• [Ugly Canuck]

  Not entirely – for I have always had a fondness for useless knowledge.

  • [Ugly Canuck]

    Or perhaps I should say, inconsequential knowledge.

• [Anonymous]

  I am quite fond of both the quantum theory of electrodynamics and general relativity – but at least one of them is very likely wrong, since neither one scales to the other.

• [knappa]

  luminiferous aether and Kelvin’s vortex theory of atoms: The idea was that atoms were knotted vortices in the aether and that different atoms corresponded to different types of knot. Killed by subatomic particles and the nonexistence of aether.

• [KremlinLaptop]

  Darwin’s theories on evolution.

  /troll (also with a hint of truth, since depending on which bit you’re poking at there was a lot that was ‘wrong’ for lack of information or study. It’d of course be funnier to just say “EVOLUTION” and leave it at that but I’m pedantic and can’t in good conscience do it even in parody and jest.

  …This is why I never got into comedy.)

  • [HerkyDerky]

    Evolution, but only because later ideas carried small changes that made them more fit?

• [conflator]

  I always liked the luminiferous aether, but more for the experiment that cast doubt on it:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson-Morley_experiment

  I was always thought that was a lovely and elegant experiment.

• [pinehead]

  I always liked Lamarckism, first proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (a forerunner of Chuckie D. and our modern view of evolution).

  Lamarck’s concept of evolution could be summed-up thusly (c&p from Wikipedia):

  1. Le pouvoir de la vie (a complexifying force) – in which the natural, alchemical movements of fluids would etch out organs from tissues, leading to ever more complex construction regardless of the organ’s use or disuse. This would drive organisms from simple to complex forms.

  2. L’influence des circonstances (an adaptive force) – in which the use and disuse of characters led organisms to become more adapted to their environment. This would take organisms sideways off the path from simple to complex, specialising them for their environment.

  What that means is that Lamarck believed evolution happened on the level of individual organism, who would then pass on to their offspring any useful adaptations acquired during the parent individual’s lifetime.

  Darwin, of course, proved that the individual’s impact on species-level evolution is far less than what Lamarck proposed.

  Lamarckian Reasoning, therefore, says that you can predict the future of a lineage (or sometimes of an individual) by studying the relevant past. Lamarck himself never actually said that, but his work was interpreted this way. Naturally, this way of reasoning has also been disproven.

• [ecobore]

  Well, if I came from the middle of the US I would say Evolution!!! but fortunately I don’t!!!
  What! you mean the earth ISN’T flat?!

• [bklynchris]

  BUT Maggie, Science is NEVER wrong…..ask Corrie…..

  I am partial to preformationism (the thought of being born with thousands of homunculi waiting to be born is well, just darn exciting) and who can turn up their nose at Lamarck’s theory of evolution (that whole giraffe neck thing made sense to me when I was 10. In fact, I still prefer it with regard to giraffes).

  • [Nadreck]

    Someone (Ted Chiang?) wrote a great story based on the assumption that those “thousands of homunculi” theories were true. The extrapolations about how bio-tech and medicine would then work were great.

    Now, back in the Golden Age of SF just about all the pulp stuff was based on theories that later turned out to be wrong: especially the aether. Here’s a challenge for all you writer types: pick your favourite discredited theory (preferably one that hasn’t already been done to death), create a universe where it’s true, and then see what kind of nifty extrapolations into technology and biology you can build into a story set in that universe.

• [kenahoo]

  Alun Anderson’s response (apparently he’s the former Editor-in-Chief and Publishing Director of New Scientist) really raised my left Jentsch – “Evolutionary theory teaches that all creatures are equally adapted to the niches in which they live; every branch of the tree is thus in a sense equally perfect.”

  That seems pretty silly. If a population adapts over time to a niche, then it’s better adapted at the “end” than at the “beginning”, right? And how on earth would you measure how well a creature is adapted to a niche, anyway?

• [El Mariachi]

  What was the Greek thing where all matter is a result of interference patterns in a constant rain of “atoms?” That’s fun to think about when stoned.

  • [Ugly Canuck]

    This may be the fellow whose ideas you’re thinking of:

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

    Atoms, eh?

• [Anonymous]

  Homeopathy.
  As a student in molecular biology I just can’t stand the view of it.
  Homeopathy’s priciples are riduculus. It is also often confused by many people with those “natural” remedies and nutraceutics wich are actually really cool and usefull.
  In homeopathy the doses of the “active” ingredients are some times so small that you are not likely to find a single molecule of it.
  But they make you pay for It.
  It’s complete nonsense sold as medicine.

  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16125589

• [MollyMaguire]

  The lipid hypothesis, except that it’s not dead yet.

• [Brainspore]

  I like the “tactile theory” of light which postulated that our eyes work by sending out invisible beams that “feel” objects, kind of like the way bats use sonar.

  • [jackdavinci]

    “tactile theory of light”

    Not that I don’t believe you (that totally explains Superman’s heat vision), but, how did they explain the superobvious correlation between lightsources and light?

  • [Ugly Canuck]

    Wasn’t it the sun-worshipers who taught that particular theory?

    • [Brainspore]

      I’m not sure who started that theory but it was pretty widespread, off-and-on. If memory serves even Leonardo Da Vinci thought that was the way our eyes worked.

      • [Ugly Canuck]

        IIRC, those kooky ancient Egyptians held to foolish notions, some such as you have related.

        For more about the “crystalline spheres”, the particular bit of foolishness I referred to earlier, see here:

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

        ..and for where we are today on that topic:

        http://www.universetoday.com/

        It is tough to know where you are, if you don’t know where you’ve been.

• [Anonymous]

  Laurie Anderson’s (expensive) moonglasses. Yeah. Once again you’ve nailed it Maggie !

• [jonw]

  Oh, Oh!
  Eating fat makes you fat and is generally bad for you. If you have diabetes you should eat plenty of carbs and low fat.

• [swlabr]

  There is a funny scientific consensus here for helicopters=ulcers; Not: stress=ulcers. But when I had my ulcer, I was stressed out. Cause and effect can be complex sometimes.

  My theory is that helicopters exist. And that you tend to feel them more when you are stressed out. Science.

  • [Ugly Canuck]

    Stress is no joke: stress is a killer.

• [Kosmoid]

  HRT

• [Ugly Canuck]

  Crystal spheres to explain the planetary motions!