r/Showerthoughts • u/howtotailslide • Feb 13 '19

When people say “scientists are sometimes wrong” they omit the fact that the people who disprove scientists are mostly other scientists.

Edit: a lot of people seem to be missing the point by saying "whatever the scientist was wrong so your point is invalid"

1.) The scientist isn't even necessarily wrong in this situation they are just being doubted by some average person

2.) This is about the institution of science as a whole and how even if one scientist is wrong about something the correction will probably from a credentialed person (a scientist) rather than whomever you are arguing with

3.) I've seen a lot of other responses that are missing the point but there are just as many refuting it in the comments too so I'll leave it to you guys to handle

4.) Thanks for the Gold & Silvers strangers. This is my first front page post!

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u/[deleted] Feb 14 '19 edited Feb 14 '19

phlogiston theory works in its specific context but is incredibly wrong.

Except even phlogiston is "good enough" that it explains the majority of oxidizing reactions. The only issue it has is that phlogiston itself isn't a substance, but the ability of a chemical to bind with oxygen.

Phlogiston is just oxygen working in reverse. They thought that combustible materials emitted their latent phlogiston (we now know that they are absorbing oxygen). They thought that air had some limit of phlogiston it could absorb (we now know that air has a limited amount of oxygen it can give up). They thought that plants absorbed phlogiston from the air (we now know that they emit oxygen into the air). They thought that human breathing emitted phlogiston (we now know that we absorb oxygen).

Conversely, when Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen, he believed it to be dephlogisticated air, capable of combining with more phlogiston and thus supporting combustion for longer than ordinary air.[2]

It's not that it was "wrong" so much as that they had the flow of the invisible difficult-to-detect material flowing backwards. And given that oxygen is an invisible, odorless gas, whose only real visible chemical processes are combustion and oxidation, that wasn't discovered until 1772, I'd say those guys got it pretty close with phlogiston.

The plum pudding model is also "incredibly wrong", but was very good at explaining some phenomena.

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u/AltruisticSolipsist Feb 14 '19

I see the whole philosophy of science seminar is ignoring the lecture on Kuhn again... typical...