From: turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech,sci.med
Subject: Inappropriate rejections in science  (was: Truzzi Lecture)
Followup-To: sci.philosophy.tech
Date: 9 Jan 1993 11:30:50 -0600
Organization: CS Dept, University of Texas at Austin
NNTP-Posting-Host: im4u.cs.utexas.edu
Summary: Where are they?

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Cross-posted and redirected to sci.philosophy.tech.

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In article <1993Jan8.194627.20986@netcom.com> noring@netcom.com (Jon Noring) writes:
>
> Here's an excerpt from Truzzi's lecture which follows in whole, just to give
> you an idea of its' contents:

I thank Jon Noring for posting this excerpt.  All remaining
single-indent text is from this excerpt, i.e., Truzzi's words,
not Jon Noring's.

> The history of science is full of some very notable rejections.  Some of them
> are now even silly sounding.  Lord Kelvin said that x-rays would prove to be
> a hoax.  Thomas Watson, once chairman of the board of IBM, said in 1943, "I
> think there is a world market for about five computers".  This got so bad
> that in 1889, Charles Duell, who was then the commissioner of the US Office 
> of Patents, wrote a letter to president McKinley asking him to abolish the
> Patents Office since "everything that can be invented has been invented". 
> [See note at end of this post for a later clarification of this fact.]  Ernst
> Mach said he could not accept the theory of relativity any more than he could
> accept the existence of atoms and other such dogmas, as he put it.  Edison
> supposedly said that he saw no commercial future for the light bulb.  When
> the phonograph was first demonstrated at the French Academy of Science, one
> scientist leaped up, grabbed the exhibitor, started shaking him, and said, "I
> won't be taken in by your ventriloquist!"  Rutherford called atomic power
> "moonshine".  The history of science is full of such crazy stories.

Yes, the history of science *is* full of these crazy stories.
But I do not think any of these stories illustrates Truzzi's
point very well.  He gives two *marketing* errors (Watson and
Edison) which might cause a businessman to blush, but that hardly
reflects on the speakers' practice of *science*.  (In fact, these
errors are notable chiefly because their authors were applied
scientists whose business acumen was otherwise noted.)  He gives
a (possibly cryptic) quote from a patent official that probably
had less effect on science then than it does today.  And he
states several errors individual scientists made about particular
theories or phenomenon that had little effect in slowing their
general acceptance.

If these are the most serious errors on the side of caution that
a historian of science can find, then we would have to conclude
that in terms of rejecting the wild, the practice of science is
right on track.  Personally, I don't believe it.  I have no doubt
that there *are* significant errors of this type, and I think it
would be interesting to hear some of them as exploration of the
problem Truzzi describes.  But let's be clear about what such an
error would be.  It would be the delay by some decades (or at
least some years) of the general acceptance in the relevant field
of a significant piece of knowledge because those in the field
were too stubborn or too cautious or because the institutions
concerned were too inflexible.  

Does anyone want to volunteer examples?  Such errors would be
particularly interesting in the hard sciences.  To avoid
controversy, it would be best if such proposed errors were ones
that are now widely recognized as errors.  (Those who believe
that their favorite theory today is an example can take this as
an historical exercise of looking for the mistakes of
yesteryear.)

Russell