Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Well... there *have* been scientific theories which were considered 
> ridiculous for a long time, which eventually turned out to be correct. 

  I think this happened mostly at the latter half of the 1800's and very
early in the 1900's. Many prominent scientists had got a bit arrogant
because they believed that almost everything that there is to know about
physics and the Universe is known, that there's nothing new left to
discover. In other words, that the science branch of physics is "complete".
Measurements which contradicted established theories, while a bit
uncomfortable, were often just dismissed as having some simple explanation.

  While arrogant people will always exist, I think the scientific community
as a whole has learned its lesson and got mostly over this kind of mentality
after relativity and quantum mechanics basically showed that almost
everything we thought we know is inaccurate.

  New plausible theories are not immediately shut down and ridiculed.
There have been several examples posted in this very newsgroup (eg.
about those articles dealing with black holes and GR).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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