And here's one from Carl Sagan for a nice counterpoint:<p>"The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
It's nice to see that not all of the claims made that turned out to be false were in the negative.<p>e.g:<p><i>Automobiles will start to decline almost as soon as the last shot is fired in World War II. The name of Igor Sikorsky will be as well known as Henry Ford's, for his helicopter will all but replace the horseless carriage as the new means of popular transportation. Instead of a car in every garage, there will be a helicopter.... These 'copters' will be so safe and will cost so little to produce that small models will be made for teenage youngsters. These tiny 'copters, when school lets out, will fill the sky as the bicycles of our youth filled the prewar roads. - Harry Bruno, aviation publicist, 1943.</i><p>Furthermore, I notice that's by an aviation publicist; and that just happens to lend to my other comment / question:<p>How many of these people were paid to have the stance that they had?
Can anyone explain the flaw in Bickerton's reasoning? It's not obvious to me where the mistake is:<p>"For a projectile entirely to escape the gravitation of earth, it needs a velocity of 7 miles a second. The thermal energy of a gramme at this speed is 15,180 calories... The energy of our most violent explosive--nitroglycerine--is less than 1,500 calories per gramme. Consequently, even had the explosive nothing to carry, it has only one-tenth of the energy necessary to escape the earth... Hence the proposition appears to be basically impossible."
This seems interesting:<p>> The menace to our people of vehicles of this type hurtling through our streets and along our roads and poisoning the atmosphere would call for prompt legislative action ...<p>Is this really so off-the-mark? Or have we just got used to vehicles being the kings of the streets, displacing pedestrians and filling our breathing air with pollutants?
My all time favorite from Paul Krugman:<p>"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
I find this one odd:<p>>People give ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon... Whoever wishes to appear clever must devise some new system, which of all systems is of course the very best. This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but the sacred scripture tells us [Joshua 10:13] that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth.
- Martin Luther (1483-1546) [Criticizing Copernicus' heliocentric theory of planetary motion.]<p>Because Copernicus wasn't the first astronomer to suggest this. In fact there's a very long line of Muslim astronomers that preceded Copernicus and noticed that the Greek model was wrong, based on a very simple observation: if the earth is stationary and every thing else revolves around it, the view of the heavens should be the same every night (which it isn't). In fact the Muslims actually proposed and experimentally tested several models before Copernicus.
"It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years." - John von Neumann in 1949
<i>Don't go West young man. (Advice to Columbus.)
I. A Voyage to Asia would require three years.
II. The western Ocean is infinite and perhaps unnavigable.
III. If he reached the Antipodes he could not get back.
IV There are no Antipodes because the greater part of the globe is covered with water, and because St. Augustine said so.
V. Of the five zones, only three are habitable.
VI. So many centuries after the Creation, it is unlikely that anyone could find hitherto unknown lands of any value.
- Report of the committee organized in 1486 by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain to study Columbus' plans to find a shorter route to India.</i><p>Makes you wonder about widely derided projects such as Mars One.
Reading this list just gives me a head-rush of joyous giddiness. Take that, craven old conservatives and naysayers!<p>"Men might as well project a voyage to the Moon as attempt to employ steam navigation against the stormy North Atlantic Ocean."<p>- Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859), Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College, London.
> Animals, which move, have limbs and muscles. The earth does not have limbs and muscles; therefore it does not move.<p>> - Scipio Chiaramonti [Professor of philosophy and mathematics at University of Pisa, arguing against the heliocentrc system, 1633]<p>I can't help thinking that particular sentence context is more political than `scientific`.
Is it too much to ask for references? I have had too many bad experiences over the years where person x was alleged to have said something when in fact never did.
A derived blog post by Sam Altman: <a href="http://blog.samaltman.com/technology-predictions" rel="nofollow">http://blog.samaltman.com/technology-predictions</a>
not in the same vein as "it'll never work", but, arthur-eddington's heavy-handed approach to subramanyam-chandrashekar's theory on maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star (chandrashekhar's-limit), seems to have set back cosmology by at least couple of decades.
what is kind of interesting, is that, lot's of luminaries f.e. bohr, fowler, pauli etc. agreed with his (chandra's) analysis, but owing to reputation of eddington, were unwilling to support him publicly.<p>an excellent book by arthur-miller (empire-of-stars) is quite <i>fascinating</i>
And just to think: what if the human race from the beginning of time, never lost any knowledge. No libraries were burnt, books and theories weren't banned, scientist kept their heads...on their bodies, info after a fallen empire was retained, the dark ages never happened, the pyramid mystery would never have been one, etc..., would we be several hundred years ahead of where we are now? Or is there some existential force that dictates the progression of innovation? Is it tied to the evolution of the human brains' capabilities?
There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.
- Kenneth Olsen, president and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.<p>If he had just said "data" instead of computer.