Comment by pavel_lishin
6 hours ago
How do you mean? I cannot remember any particular scientific revolution where scientists were suicidal, or even particularly crestfallen.
Quantum Mechanics is the closest thing I can think of, where Einstein famously refused to accept some of the implications, and where scientists had great disagreements about things like the Copenhagen interpretation and what it means for the actual nature of reality - but I don't think any of them were sad about it.
One of the boldest chapter one introductions I've ever seen comes to mind:
- "States of Matter", David L. Goodstein, https://archive.org/details/statesofmatter0000good_e2n5/page...
A very interesting story that's worth reading up on. "Natural philosophers" of the day refused to accept the idea of a particle too small to directly observe on purely philosophical grounds. They essentially bullied him out of the field for championing the idea of the atom, despite his math yielding numerous correct results. They fruitlessly pursued the idea of energetics instead. (One of the many instances of die hard philosophers playing the villain in physics history. See also why Emmy Noether wasn't given a professorship despite a letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein.)
This makes it perhaps not a particularly good example of the phenomena being discussed, as he was suicidal not because of what he had discovered, but because no one believed what he had discovered.
I looked this up, and sure enough, Ernst Mach was the one who lead the charge (a self proclaimed positivist, which is a position that many scientists would gladly say they support).
Sure enough, it's what I thought - you don't mean that some evil boogeyman named Hegel lead a worldwide charge against physics. (I doubt Hegel even understood physics, lol. But you get my point.)
You mean that two physicists had a disagreement, one held institutional power, and ostracized the other.
Fine, but then why attack philosophy? Things are philosophy until they're not. Dogma happens in every field.
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> See also why Emmy Noether wasn't given a professorship despite a letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein
I thought that was sexism rather than philosophers? This was the same era and place that mostly ignored Bertha Benz.
(Or did you mean after moving to the USA?)
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It is, of course, meant to be taken in a humorous tone here, despite the morbid subject.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall had to drink a beaker of Helicobacter pylori because no one would believe it caused ulcers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis wound up in an insane asylum for suggesting surgeons should wash their hands.
Scientists get hidebound just like the rest of us, at times.
Those are definitely unfortunate examples and I can see how those environments pushed them to their limits. But if we're talking large-scale systematic thinking about what kind of data would be necessary to show that there's such a thing as a typical, characteristic civilization scale negative reaction to scientific revolutions, these don't demonstrate that this is the usual case. Obviously they're important in their own right.
But also the book doesn't suggest that scientists going missing was just a function of humanity's customary response to scientific progress. In the book, it's a very intentional sabotage campaign.
The point being made is about the general reaction to weird results. The original supposition was that it would be implausible for scientists at large to have an adverse reaction to results that defied their current worldview. Given that we have seen this play out, there is in fact nothing implausible about it at all.
The specifics (proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging scientific experiments by altering the outcomes into incoherent results, the adverse reaction being suicide) aren't important here, because that's obviously the realm of fiction -- we don't need an actual instance of scientists committing suicide to suggest that it's plausible, because we don't have an actual instance of proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging results[1]. We just need to acknowledge that adverse reactions to unexpected results do happen, so plausibly in a fictional story if you have very unexpected results then your scientists could have very adverse reactions as well.
[1] That we know of.
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> In the book, it's a very intentional sabotage campaign.
Active malice seems more likely to succeed, doesn't it?
They can gaslight people in their own heads, after all.
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> wound up in an insane asylum for suggesting surgeons should wash their hands.
Was rejected and mocked by the medical community for his idea, developed a drinking problem and eventually committed to an asylum by his colleagues after having a nervous breakdown. While in the asylum he was beaten by the guards and died from a wound infection ... yikes!!
Neither Richard Feynman nor the quantum-physics community in general reacted very well to the first efforts to test Bell's theorem experimentally, at first: https://web.archive.org/web/20250723224559/https://arxiv.org... .
Both examples from medicine rather than physics. Can you give an example from physics? Preferably from the last century or two?
The parent post said scientists; medicine is something I've more knowledge of. You can carry the goalposts yourself, if you wanna move them around!
(The parent post also already mentions Einstein on quantum physics.)
I'm not sure about self harm or whatever, but Planck's Principle [1] was not stated without cause: 'Science progresses one funeral at a time.' And that was a quote from an outsized figure during the golden age of physics.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle