* KLC Lewis wrote, On 4/5/2007 10:45 PM:
"Jeff" wrote in message
. ..
* KLC Lewis wrote, On 4/5/2007 9:46 PM:
....
My problem with your story is the implication is that society freely
accepts theories that are later shown to be false. While there may be
some cases of that, dinosaur extinction by gigantism is not one of them.
Whether you were taught it, imagined it, or made it up yesterday is
irrelevant. It was never accepted as probable by a significant number of
scientists; it was just one of many hypotheses proposed to explain a
mystery.


Two interesting cases you have - as I said there are a few.

As recently as 20 years ago, the medical community believed, and taught,
that ulcers were caused by stress. Treatment for the condition was based
upon that theory. It was universally accepted. It was nonetheless wrong.


Not entirely true, its still accepted that emotional stress can make
the symptoms worse, and physical stress seems to trigger the ulcer
infection. A large segment of the population is infected with the
bacteria, but only a small number get ulcers - the reason for this is
not understood.

Also, it must be remembered that this breakthrough in treatment
involves drugs that did not exist a few decades earlier, so reducing
stress and modifying diet was not a bad treatment.

You would do better to find cases where the traditional treatment was
the complete opposite of what we believe to be true today. In the
field of medicine, it should be easy to find dozens of such examples.

As recently as today, students are still being taught that Pluto is a
planet, even though it is really only a "Kuyper Belt Object," and there are
a significant number of *larger* Kuyper Belt Objects that have *never* been
considered to be planets. Indeed, at least one Kuyper Belt Object (other
than Pluto) has a moon, yet is still not a planet. So why are students still
being taught outdated "facts"?

This issue is total bogus, as it has little to do with Pluto, but with
the discovery of additional objects that caused astronomers to rethink
the traditional classification system. In particular, the discovery
of another roughly the size of Pluto meant that we had to decide
between an ever-growing pantheon of planets, or 8 true planets, and a
growing list of "dwarf" or "minor" planets.

I remember being taught that Pluto was an "odd" planet, quite
different from others. I also remember Fred Whipple, Al Cameron and
others predicting that we might find numerous objects out there. Fred
Leonard even speculated in 1930 that Pluto may be the first of a
series of ultra-Neptunian bodies. It was just that we had to wait
until 1992 to begin to discover the large number of objects.

BTW, the term "Kuiper Belt" is somewhat controversial, since Kuiper
had nothing to do with the discovery, and even claimed that it would
unlikely to find much. The "Leonard-Whipple" belt would be more
appropriate, but many favor "Trans-Neptunian Objects" (TNO's) or Minor
Planets.


What science considers to be truth today is what will be taught in schools
for some time to come. Textbooks are not printed anew each time a new fact
displaces an old fact -- nor can they be. So there will always be a lag
between new discoveries and their acceptance by the general public -- for
that matter, even by the experts in that particular field. And even then,
there will always be the "old guard" who will cling steadfastly to what
*they* learned when *they* were in school.

True, but it is sad that the common perception, reinforced by the
popular press, often misses the true story. For example, the real
story of Pluto is not that we lost a planet, but that we gained a
whole category of minor planets.

It is also sad that one book or movie that had little scientific
foundation becomes remembered as the "consensus view." A perfect
example of this is the book "The Cooling" which I happened to run into
at the library yesterday. Dave mentioned in another thread that this
was the "consensus view" in the 70's, but in fact it was a fringe
view, not supported by any science. Even today, its poor
interpretations of the contemporary science are repeated to show how
science has "flip-flopped."


Eventually, most -- if not all -- science textbooks will teach that Global
Warming is caused by CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere by human activity.
It may be taught as only a theory, but it will be accepted as fact, as the
most current theories generally are. And by that time, it is highly likely
that this theory, too, will be surplanted by another.

It is highly likely that there will be some significant change to the
theory, but "supplanted" is not quite the right word. Any new theory
has to take into account the data that has been collected thus far.
As more and more data seems to support the consensus view of
anthropogenic climate change, it becomes less likely that the current
theory will be replaced by something totally different.