Has there ever been anything originally dismissed as pseudoscience that was later proven to be legit?
Has there ever been anything originally dismissed as pseudoscience that was later proven to be legit?
There is a tendency for real doctors with backing from Academia or whoever's in charge of deciding how you science to just plain getting it wrong and not realizing it for a long time.
Homeopathy is a good example of this, as it appeared to get great results when it was created during the Bubonic Plague and had such staying power to the point that in the 1800's it was considered a legitimate and mainstream field of medical practice.
Now today we know Homeopathy is nonsense... Remembers New Age Healing is still a thing Okay, those of us with sense know homeopathy is garbage. With the only reason it was getting such wonderful results was because the state of medicine for a long period of time in human history was so god awful that not getting any treatment at all was actually the smarter idea. Since Homeopathy is basically just "No medicine at all", that's exactly what was happening with its success.
Incidentally this is also why the Christian Science movement (Which was neither Christian nor Science) had so many people behind it, people were genuinely living longer from it because it required people to stop smoking at a time when no one knew smoking killed you.
Anyhow. With that in mind, I want to know if there's a case where the exact opposite happened.
Where Scientists got together on a subject, said "Wow, only an idiot would believe this. This clearly does not work, can not work, and is totally impossible."
Only for someone to turn around, throw down research proving that there was no pseudo in this proposed pseudoscience with their finest "Ya know I had to do it 'em" face.
The closest I can think of is how people believed that Germ Theory, the idea that tiny invisible creatures were making us all sick, were the ramblings of a mad man. But that was more a refusal to look at evidence, not having evidence that said "No" that was replaced by better evidence that said "Disregard that, the answer is actually Yes"
Can anyone who sciences for a living instead of merely reading science articles as a hobby and understanding basically only a quarter of them at best tell me if something like that has happened?
Thank you, have a nice day.
You're viewing a single thread.
Kind of a reverse Uno on your question, but I thought it was interesting while Nazism came to prominence, some scientists were like hey I'm just as racist and anti-semitic as you, but this race stuff you're doing isn't very scientific. They were dismissed as quacks. Later after doing horrible experiments, nazi scientists were frustrated that their findings weren't adding up to their ideology.
See also: Jesse Owens.
From what I understand, there's this myth that Nazi Scientists were pardoned because they revolutionized science with experiments too horrible for anyone else to perform, but the data we learned from this was just THAT amazing. (TERFs like to make their own spin on this by saying the genital reconstruction used in gender affirming surgeries today was made by the Nazis)
in reality, no they were just massive racists and America only joined the Allies instead of the Axis Powers because Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, had that not happen we may have joined up with Hitler. So, eh, just grab a few of the doctors with operation paperclip, put em to work getting us to the moon....
From what I understand all Mengele really learned was that if you kill children, they die.
Which I'm not a historian, but I think we already assumed as much....
Yeah, used to think that of the nazi scientists, but that was done for Japanese scientists because as awful as they were they actually provided useful data. The nazi scientists stuff was pretty much useless because it was all in furthering their dumb race shit.
What is the basis of your statements that the USA may have joined with the axis?
Their actions supporting the allied powers alone stands in stark contrast to that statement.
That’s quite the assertion.
You had a bunch of "America First" movements, protests in favor of the Axis Powers, Hitler being Time's "Man of the Year"
Hitler even based a lot of the Nazi movement on shit America was literally already doing
So basically you’re saying because some people supported it and because Hitler borrowed from eugenics programs in the USA that we were potentially going to join the axis powers?
That’s the basis of your assertion? That is seriously weak.
I think most of the german scientists the USA took were in fields like rocketry and physics.
The U.S. supplied more than $600 billion (in 2023 dollars) in lend-lease aid, mostly to Britain and the USSR, starting in March 1941. It's ludicrous to say that they were ever considering joining the Axis powers.