Ask HN: What is the most brutal and thorough refutation you have ever seen?
I am trying to find examples of ideas that seemed reasonable at the time, but were then dismantled by another thinker. Ideally, this refutation would go on to change or form the consensus on this issue among experts.
Please no Ben Shapiro videos :P
4 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 23.5 ms ] threadThe church thought the earth was the center of the galaxy and some dude proved them wrong.
A lot of medical stuff.
I’m just shotgunning here Incase no one else gives an answer
Copernicus vs. the Ptolemaic system of astronomy?
Most recent scientific paradigm shifts, like Einstein vs. Newtonian physics, aren't really "brutal" since the previous system survives as a limiting case for moderate energies.
Wegener's refutation of the theory that the continents were fixed wasn't forceful enough. He proposed plate tectonics in 1915, but it wasn't widely accepted until the 1960s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics#Development_of....
I was reading him this morning and, although elegant and eloquent, he is "brutal". (I'm thinking of Brutalist architecture more than raw violence.)
The velocity of light in a vacuum is fixed.
The laws of physics are the same from every (inertial framework) viewpoint.
Ergo, from just those two ideas, everything we thought we knew as fundamental truths about time and space was wrong and the real world is stranger than anyone ever guessed.
Yah, it's brutal.