Major 4/17 traffic from SLATE STAR CODEX? Hey Scott,

First, I think you're confusing your readers by calling it "top ten." Many may miss the fact this is an alphabetical list. You've simply gone through the entries with names A-D. Some pretty weak examples there; no Semmelwise, no McClintock, Barry Marshall, etc. It's no way a Top Ten list of vindicated mavericks. That's an OK approach, if you'd presented it as a somewhat random sampling. As it stands, you seemingly "win the fight" by demonstrating the great weakness of the top ten examples, but without actually using a list of the top ten examples. I hope it was just a mistake.

Second: this is a list of: Ridiculed. Then vindicated. The duration between the two isn't an issue. Were they ridiculed, and later proved correct? That's my requirement. My original intent was to debunk the claims of 1990s SCI.SKEPTIC newsgroup and others, whose members absolutely insisted that, other than the Galileo event, such problems Don't Exist In Science (since if they did, they'd be quite important, and obviously their textbooks would have presented the many instances!) On the contrary, the contemporary ridicule-vindication thing makes science look bad, and hence is a taboo topic. It's avoided in science history treatments, and certainly never appears in science-worshipping pop articles. I found no lists online like this anywhere, so in 2002 slapped one together myself. (That's a key point. Where are such lists? Several have appeared online in later years, even some using my words but adding more prose. But what about the ten decades 1900-2002? )

Third: Only ten years until vindication? That's supposedly "immedate?" Or, should we instead say that acceptance took nearly forever: typically ten years! Ahem. :) If each vindication came after a few years, I very specifically DON'T pretend the ridicule never happened, nor do I dismiss it as easily-forgivable, as you seem to. Yes, the typical timeline is ten entire years before vindication. Ten years of new postdocs entering the field, ten years of folks achieving tenure. You suggest that, before the ridicule can become a problem for science, it needs to persist thirty years? "Only" ten brief years of blocked publications, that's nothing? Therefore all the victims of such ridicule-suppression should have no reason to complain? Me, I insist that it's supposed to be zero years; that this ridicule-then-vindication is a symptom of a quite serious, (if suppressed and hidden) outright disease in modern science.

As statistics it's frightening, since these small and large instances must be part of a distribution. It's a distribution where any major successful suppressions are completely erased. Truely-suppressed breakthroughs, the ones with no later vindication; they don't appear in records. We have no clue about their number, except by examining these known instances of the nearly-suppressed. By definition, only the suppressed-vindicated breakthroughs can be detected. Perhaps we're all lucky, and my list only lacks a tiny percentage of ridiculed-never-vindicated. On the other hand, instead my list may be the tiny, visible "statistical tail" of an enormous number of never-vindicated, lost breakthroughs. (Chilling thought: the next Einstein has died unknown, refused publication, having lacked the necessary aggression to fight for ~ten years before eventual vindication. More chilling: what if by now there have been two lost "next Einsteins?" Or twenty?)

Third, read again, Doppler never tested the Optical Doppler Effect using trains and trumpets. His optical theory was passionately rejected by physicists, and not accepted until astronomical red shifts were discovered after his death. (The overtly hostile rejection may even have played a part in his dying.)

Fourth, JL Baird's televisor: the Royal Society members coming out of the meeting were being interviewed, and they sneered at Baird, convinced that his demonstration was a hoax. When "they didn't believe it," it was because they'd decided Baird was a swindler running some sort of scam. I'm not finding that ref. online. Perhaps it was the book "The Experts Speak."

Finally, we differ as to our views of this process. I see these people as heroes who had to actively fight for numerous years to prevail against a biased, ignorant, hostile hoard, with the constant possibility that the hoard would win, and their breakthroughs be ignored or even go unpublished entirely. Various autobiographies go into detail about it all. But you seem to see the same events as examples of normal science, as if there was no danger of complete suppression, as if all these researchers would somehow be automatically vindicated, no need for any effort much less their years of battle. Also, if you see all this as ignorable and forgivable, I see this as "visible flames coming from the seams of the solid rocket boosters!" They're not normal, they're not supposed to be there. All these events serve as danger-signs for much larger events, yet they're being minimized, tolerated, "made normal" by the scientific community, same as you do in your posting. Clearly these automatic hostile emotional responses to new ideas are no part of the scientific process. (Planck isn't supposed to be correct when he insists that science can only progress, funeral by funeral, because the current crop of experts would rather die than change!)

Statistics: as "automobile accidents," these examples serve as numerous "near misses," implying a hidden population of "fatal crashes." The existence of these instances indicates much larger and invisible events: probable major disasters. But think about it. The fatal ones, no matter how large, will never be noticed. Any such disasters become completely concealed, by definition. How many Einstein-scale breakthroughs have been completely lost so far? None? None, because we have no evidence of any? But since they're lost, we can't detect them, and their number could be anything. They're gone: either they were never published anywhere, that or else today they're barely known and regarded as useless crackpottery. (Example, a poor one: what if something similar to Blondlot's N-rays actually had been real, and by banishing it to the crackpot realm, an enormous physics breakthrough was lost? Ridiculed, never-vindicated genuine discoveries become inseparable from known crackpottery, and thus disappear from our statistics.)

"Those we see are in the daylight. Those in darkness don't get seen"

- Bertold Brecht, Threpenny Opera's final line. OK, who are the actual "Top Ten" vindicated discoverers Scott should analyze? Everybody will have a different list! Galileo Semmelweis Wegener McClintock Nottebohm Bretz Prusiner Zwicky Marshall Shechtman One I missed: J. Edgar Lilienfeld, who invented the transistor in 1923, but after a decade had made no headway against disbelief, and finally retired and gave up. Two decades later Bell Labs stumbled upon the modern Bipolar transistor when trying to find some way to get around the expired 1925 Lilienfeld patents on the Field Effect Transistor. Bell Labs then ran a bit of a smear-campaign, claiming that Lilienfeld transistors didn't work; even that Lilienfeld never built any himself. (Yet Lilienfeld was an experimentalist, and had a 4-transistor radio in the 1930s, showing it to manufacturers, but facing a solid wall of emotional responses.) Now it turns out that Bell Labs had successfully reproduced Lillienfeld transistors, even publishing a paper about it in the same journal with their famous first "crystal triode" paper. And they concealed the fact that the paper was a test of Lilienfeld transistors. (Heh, not part of Official Transistor History! Neither is Lilienfeld.)

Want a free online book referencing some of this vindication topic? The 1950s edition of Beveridge "The Art of Scientific Investigation" has a whole section on Difficulties in science, including resistance to new ideas. And about Scientific Concensus, Thomas Gold points out a serious instability in the peer-review process, almost guaranteed to produce false concensus which halts progress for long periods.