> ||Zwicky produced hundreds of publications over a long career, covering a great breadth of topics. This brief selection, with comments, gives a taste of his work.||

> Sorry, this does not sound like a man ignored and dismissed.

>>Um. Read again. Especially the title. It’s a list of *vindicated* crackpots; people who were targets of ridicule, but where the ridicule turned out to be bogus, and the targets of scoffing eventually won the fight.

No. You’ll need to read that page yourself again. The claim:

||They rarely discuss the acts of intellectual suppression which were directed at the following researchers by their colleagues.||

When a man is publishing hundreds of papers and winning major awards, that is not evidence of intellectual suppression.

>|| Science has taken few wrong turns precisely because new ideas as found on sonic’s list were not simply uncritically accepted. ||

>So, the opposite of uncritical acceptance is hostile laughter and refusals to inspect evidence?

Who is refusing to inspect evidence? I myself inspected Sonic’s evidence. The evidence did not support the claim. I reported on such.

Thanks for playing. Better luck next time.

“Free Energy” is certainly a classic scam. We should initially assume that STEORN are a bunch of con men. And then investigate. Scammers are quite good at hiding evidence of dishonesty, so the warning sign of a scam becomes their lack of honesty. If we look for honesty in the usual places, but find no solid evidence, (if we detect missing honesty,) then our initial assumption stands.

Is the above a scientific procedure? I’d say yes, since in a situation where dishonesty is probable, or even near-certain, then it’s extremely unwise to proceed as if there was no danger of being fooled.

> Sorry, this does not sound like a man ignored and dismissed.

Um. Read again. Especially the title. It’s a list of *vindicated* crackpots; people who were targets of ridicule, but where the ridicule turned out to be bogus, and the targets of scoffing eventually won the fight.

|| Science has taken few wrong turns precisely because new ideas as found on sonic’s list were not simply uncritically accepted. ||

So, the opposite of uncritical acceptance is hostile laughter and refusals to inspect evidence? Hardly. Skepticism is based on investigation and refusal to accept claims until forced to do so by the evidence. On the other hand, if one is laughing, sneering, and saying “Oh please,” it’s a big red flag for emotional involvement. If you’re indulging in scorn, then you’ve parted ways with rationality, and you’re not at all a skeptic, and certainly are behaving the very opposite of a scientist. Scornful laughter involves the psychology of playground bullies, not of rational thought.

||As ArtfulD pointed out there are vastly more discredited hypotheses littering the landscape than there are the ones that were once discredited but are now mainstream.||

Now THAT’s a good argument. When some topic attracts scorn and derision, *usually* there’s a rational cause triggering the emotion-driven attacks. But in a few rare cases, the claims later prove valid, which demonstrates that the derision was purely irrational.

Therefore when you see ridicule occurring, be careful to never thoughtlessly join the jeering crowd and participate in their Groupthink. Always stop and investigate first. Make sure that the target of the ridicule isn’t just the victim of a crowd of mindless bullies. (And then, perhaps avoid indulging in emotion-based attacks yourself, even if the victim deserves it.)

I note that Phrenology and Flat-Earth beliefs aren’t controversial topics. They don’t attract these large emotional responses, only the sad shaking of heads. Phrenology etc. is well-debunked and no threat. But apparently “Free Energy” yet remains in a very different category.

I think Carl Sagan put it “they laughed at Galileo but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown”.

Science has taken few wrong turns precisely because new ideas as found on sonic’s list were not simply uncritically accepted. Scientists were forced to defend and, I dare say, CORRECT and REVISE their initial hypotheses. Sonic might want to consider that latter point. New ideas don’t all out whole and perfect from the minds of scientists. They really don’t get it right the first time.

And for every idea that was delayed because pesky peers wanted good evidence to abandon or modify the current paradigm, how does sonic know there aren’t 100 ideas that were prevented from entering the text books and steering science wrong? Gosh, let’s abandon that chemo therapy for homeopathy or energy field manipulation. After all, according to sonic they laughed at Watson and Crick.

What’do you say, eh?

The feed showed an empty transparent plastic box bearing the words, “nothing is impossible.”

On the contrary, *nothing* is clearly possible.

An image of the display at the Kinetica museum:
http://dispatchesfromthefuture.com/2007/07/kinetica_demo_cancelled.html

It seems more appropriate to present those stories as a vindication for the system of science – even really weird ideas can win the day IF they have the evidence to support them.

From:

http://amasci.com/weird/vindac.html

“Below is a list of scientists who were reviled for their crackpottery, only to be later proven correct. Today’s science texts are dishonest to the extent that they hide these huge mistakes made by the scientific community.”

These stories include many in the last few years. ||

Yes. Stories. It’s one web pages opinion about the attitudes of other unnamed scientists. Geez. Examining one of the entries:

||Fritz Zwicky (Dark Matter)

Known in the astro research community as “Crazy Fritz,” Zwicky investigated orbit statistics of galactic clusters in 1933 and concluded that the majority of mass had an invisible unknown source. He was ignored, dismissed as an eccentric. ||

Wow. Ignored and dismissed. Terrible! But wait.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Zwicky#Honors

||In 1949, Truman awarded Zwicky the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for work on rocket propulsion during World War II.[25] In 1968, Zwicky was made professor emeritus at California Institute of Technology.

In 1972, Zwicky was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, their most prestigious award, for “distinguished contributions to astronomy and cosmology”.[29] This award noted in particular his work on neutron stars, dark matter, and cataloging of galaxies.

The asteroid 1803 Zwicky and the lunar crater Zwicky are both named in his honour.||

and

||Zwicky produced hundreds of publications over a long career, covering a great breadth of topics. This brief selection, with comments, gives a taste of his work.||

Sorry, this does not sound like a man ignored and dismissed.

Your list is cute ‘n’ all but doesn’t much rise above People magazine in terms of scholarship.

Never mind that the list of fully discredited hypotheses along with their hypothesizers is immeasurably longer than the one where initial skepticism was overcome.