There is a tendency for real doctors with backing from Academia or whoever’s in charge of deciding how you science to just plain getting it wrong and not realizing it for a long time.
Homeopathy is a good example of this, as it appeared to get great results when it was created during the Bubonic Plague and had such staying power to the point that in the 1800’s it was considered a legitimate and mainstream field of medical practice.
Now today we know Homeopathy is nonsense… Remembers New Age Healing is still a thing Okay, those of us with sense know homeopathy is garbage. With the only reason it was getting such wonderful results was because the state of medicine for a long period of time in human history was so god awful that not getting any treatment at all was actually the smarter idea. Since Homeopathy is basically just “No medicine at all”, that’s exactly what was happening with its success.
Incidentally this is also why the Christian Science movement (Which was neither Christian nor Science) had so many people behind it, people were genuinely living longer from it because it required people to stop smoking at a time when no one knew smoking killed you.
Anyhow. With that in mind, I want to know if there’s a case where the exact opposite happened.
Where Scientists got together on a subject, said “Wow, only an idiot would believe this. This clearly does not work, can not work, and is totally impossible.”
Only for someone to turn around, throw down research proving that there was no pseudo in this proposed pseudoscience with their finest “Ya know I had to do it 'em” face.
The closest I can think of is how people believed that Germ Theory, the idea that tiny invisible creatures were making us all sick, were the ramblings of a mad man. But that was more a refusal to look at evidence, not having evidence that said “No” that was replaced by better evidence that said “Disregard that, the answer is actually Yes”
Can anyone who sciences for a living instead of merely reading science articles as a hobby and understanding basically only a quarter of them at best tell me if something like that has happened?
Thank you, have a nice day.
It is weird that you start by criticizing our physical theories being descriptions of reality then end criticizing the Copenhagen interpretation, since this is the Copenhagen interpretation, which says that physics is not about describing nature but describing what we can say about nature. It doesn’t make claims about underlying ontological reality but specifically says we cannot make those claims from physics and thus treats the maths in a more utilitarian fashion.
The only interpretation of quantum mechanics that actually tries to interpret it at face value as a theory of the natural world is relational quantum mechanics which isn’t that popular as most people dislike the notion of reality being relative all the way down. Almost all philosophers in academia define objective reality in terms of something being absolute and point-of-view independent, and so most academics struggle to comprehend what it even means to say that reality is relative all the way down, and thus interpreting quantum mechanics as a theory of nature at face-value is actually very unpopular.
All other interpretations either: (1) treat quantum mechanics as incomplete and therefore something needs to be added to it in order to complete it, such as hidden variables in the case of pilot wave theory or superdeterminism, or a universal psi with some underlying mathematics from which to derive the Born rule in the Many Worlds Interpretation, or (2) avoid saying anything about physical reality at all, such as Copenhagen or QBism.
Since you talk about “free will,” I suppose you are talking about superdeterminism? Superdeterminism works by pointing out that at the Big Bang, everything was localized to a single place, and thus locally causally connected, so all apparent nonlocality could be explained if the correlations between things were all established at the Big Bang. The problem with this point of view, however, is that it only works if you know the initial configuration of all particles in the universe and a supercomputer powerful to trace them out to modern day.
Without it, you cannot actually predict any of these correlations ahead of time. You have to just assume that the particles “know” how to correlate to one another at a distance even though you cannot account for how this happens. Mathematically, this would be the same as a nonlocal hidden variable theory. While you might have a nice underlying philosophical story to go along with it as to how it isn’t truly nonlocal, the maths would still run into contradictions with special relativity. You would find it difficult to construe the maths in such a way that the hidden variables would be Lorentz invariant.
Superdeterministic models thus struggle to ever get off the ground. They only all exist as toy models. None of them can reproduce all the predictions of quantum field theory, which requires more than just accounting for quantum mechanics, but doing so in a way that is also compatible with special relativity.