Submitted by Hot----------Dog t3_xur1gi in todayilearned
Reply to comment by MechTheDane in TIL a German scientist named Alfred Wegener was ridiculed in 1912 for advancing the idea that the continents were adrift. Ridiculed as having “wandering pole plague.” or “Germanic pseudo-science” and accused Wegener of toying with the evidence to spin himself into “a state of auto-intoxication." by Hot----------Dog
Exactly. You don't get to make incredible claims that change our entire understanding of the world, present absolutely nothing to back up your claim, and then complain when they say you're crazy.
Being right doesn't matter, either. If someone in the 1500's just started claiming that all matter was composed of really really small strings, and his reasoning was "I ate some bread with LSD-precursor fungus and a mouth opened up in the center of my hand and started telling me about the strings", we'd say he was crazy, even though he was (maybe) right.
There was evidence he presented that showed it was happening, he just couldn't provide a how. That's a far cry from "absolutely nothing to back up your claim".
yes it does matter....it's like you're trying to rewrite how we look at how history has made nearly all discovery and applying the way we react to people using their own mind and attempting to make discoveries today, people didn't "internet react" to people having original thoughts back then like they do today.
His "perception" to pay attention to things that other people were overlooking for years was right whether you or anyone else could see it which is the point of discovery.
I see why you would feel that way, and maybe you’re looking at it the right way idk. But I personally don’t think so. What if I were to just start making a thousand guesses a day? No basis, I’m just going for the shotgun strategy. One of them will end up being right and I’ll be a genius. That’s a dramatic example but it’s meant to be, just to shine a light on the idea that just being the first to propose an idea without any evidence might not have a lot of importance to it.
Well did this guy just start making a thousand guesses a day? I mean if not then, yea, what you so eloquently typed out is quite dramatic and a mildly ignorant straw man scenario based off what seems like some pretty strong anti-intellectualism.
I tried specifically calling out that this was a thought experiment and not a realistic scenario, and you still made the argument you did..extreme scenarios are presented all the time in logic and philosophy for the sake of making it easier to a see a hidden truth.
"Thought experiment"
Why are you getting so aggressive? I feel like I was very nice in the first comment. It is a thought experiment.
Putting two words in quotations is aggressive. Got it.
Now you’re just playing dumb. I think we’re done here.
> I think we're done here.
Finally talking some sense.
I mean, what evidence was there for the alternative, that was completely wrong?
Well, if you're serious, the evidence that the continents didn't move was that nobody had ever seen them move, and they were in the same place they always had been as far back as there were records, at least as much as was possible to measure with the technology of the time.
To be fair M-theory or string theory has no way of being proven experimentally as of now. Which basically means, according to modern empirical sciences, that it's not really true in the sense that Newtonian mechanics is. Or the theory of relativity.
That's not to say that it's not correct. Democritus theorized the atom but had no evidence for them. Turned out they were real. There was another guy named Kaṇāda that did it as well. So maybe we will get some thing we can build to verify string theory with a apparatus. And considering how much empirical evidence does technically back up string theory, it probably is true.
It's a very strange thing in the community of physicists. They wont shut up about needing experimental evidence to show that something is true. And then they just go YEAH STRING THEORY BABY.
Name something m-theory has been used for to generate empirically falsifiable hypotheses. Anyone? Yeah, we're all out of our depth here.
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i like your version of democritus better.
In not saying you are wrong, but iirc,
a) there are a lot of theorems that "came to people" from the use of drugs and have been proven
b) sometimes people notice patterns that people, actually working in that field, dont see due to having other neuronal pathways and seeing things differently
And I for one would like to imagine that spreading thorems is a good way to test and improve current models and maybe gain a different view on them that lets one notice blindspots of it
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I get what you mean. I don’t know how those other people don’t get what you’re saying here
Then explain religion lol
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