Dr. N.-
That is a good clarification. I would note that Feynman suggested starting with Newton in a lecture I read-

What is cool is that I live in a universe in which I can feel still and have everything move around me.
Of course everyone else is the center of the universe too.
What an amazing place this is…

SARA-
can I kiss you?
Perhaps we should be glad the internet has advanced that far…

“In other words, you can’t really be wrong if you have advanced scientific understanding.”

BJ7 – really? Better read that one again. Being wrong has nothing to do with whether you have furthered scientific understanding.

I know I’m going to get this wrong or misattribute it, but I like it, so I’m going to, anyway. … Wasn’t it Sagan who said, “Geniuses are often eccentric, but being eccentric does not make you a genius?”

And @SARA, I’d say we need people to pursue those ideas to the point where they can be confidently discarded, but no further. And I think we already have plenty of those people. Steven is focusing on the people who cling to ideas long past the point where it is constructive.

If no one ever does the nutty stuff, will we miss completely some subtly of the universe or biology or chemistry or whatever? Do their failures teach us as well?

I agree that they make a great deal of distracting and often destructive noise in our current culture. Noise that skeptics spend a great deal of time trying to correct.

But in the bigger picture, maybe they just need to be in order for some stuff to be figured out. Because while most of them are nuts, once in blue moon one of them is right and if we were able to squelch all of them, we would squelch our blue moon discovery as well.

In fact, how many scientists don’t pursue an unpopular idea because it would be a bad career choice or at least open them up to ridicule. How many things don’t get learned because they didn’t pursue the idea?

Its just a thought.

To clarify – Newtons laws of motion are not invalidated. They can be seen as a special case, although one that applies in most everyday situations, to the more complete theory of relativity. You can still use Newtons laws of motion in situations where relativistic effects are not signfiicant and get the correct answer.

But of course he was wrong in terms of the underlying concept of the universe and his cosmology. He thought we lived in a classical universe when in fact we live in a relativistic universe – or whatever will be the next step in our understanding.
Not all types of “wrong” are the same, however. Sometimes wrong means incomplete or superfiicial, but still correct in some ways or as far as it goes.

I think it is more accurate to say that Einstein built on Newton, he did not replace him wholesale with a separate and incompatible paradigm. As an example of this, Einstein knew that his relativity equations had to reduce to Newtons laws in the frame of reference in which we live.

And I am not trying to defend Newton. He was brilliant, but wrong about many things. He thought alchemy was the missing piece to the grand synthesis of science with the mind of God. That was not productive research.

Newton founded classical mechanics on absolute space and absolute time.
(Space and time exist separate from matter and motion).
These ideas are very different from Einstein’s — when asked to summarize general relativity Einstein said–”Time and space and gravitation have no separate existence from matter.”
So Newton was wrong about time and space if general relativity is correct.

From
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/newton-stm/
“In recent literature, Newton’s theses regarding the ontology of space and time have come to be called substantivalism in contrast to relationism. It should be emphasized, though, that Newton did not regard space and time as genuine substances (as are, paradigmatically, bodies and minds), but rather as real entities with their own manner of existence as necessitated by God’s existence (more specifically, his omnipresence and eternality).”

Einstein didn’t put this into context– Einstein blew it out the water.

I used to think of space and time as absolute in some way. This thought was crippling to my ability to understand relativity or quantum mechanics (physics).
So while Newton left us a wonderful legacy for science and engineering– we must recognize the fail as well.
And his basic ideas about space and time are crippling to any understanding of physics as it is understood today.
So while his work is irreplaceable for a certain type of engineering problem (one that covers most engineering problems– I don’t want to minimize the usefulness)- the idea that it is ‘true’ cripples any chance of understanding physics as it is understood today.

Further Newton’s optics included an ‘aethereal medium’ that transmitted vibrations faster than light.
It is generally acknowledged that Einstein’s special theory of relativity took out the notion of the aether by generating the answers without reference to it. This is an example of where Occam’s Razor actually applies.

I’m not trying to talk bad about Newton– he was a great thinker and scientist and his work was invaluable and continues to be.
But let’s admit he was wrong about some very important things.
Very wrong about very important things.

You are using a false analogy by switching without comment between the “worldviews” popular for non- or weekly-scientific reasons in Galileo’s time, and the knowledge now established by proper sciences. You dilute your own understanding by labeling all of it as paradigms, as if mystical beliefs about the necessary perfection of geocentrism were somehow on par with the methods which established modern scientific knowledge.