Contrary to the popular narrative, the famous 1887 experiment was seen at the time as a test between different theories of the ether, not a refutation of it. Its null result ruled out the "ether wind" but not the ether itself, which Michelson continued to believe in for decades.
The orbital anomaly of Uranus correctly led to the discovery of Neptune, strengthening Newtonian theory. A similar anomaly in Mercury's orbit was only explained by General Relativity. This highlights a core challenge in science: you cannot know beforehand whether an anomaly requires a small fix or a complete paradigm shift.
We are saturated with biographies of successful people, creating survivorship bias. A collection of stories about highly talented individuals—like math olympiad winners who failed to become professional mathematicians—would be more instructive, revealing the real bottlenecks and psychological traps that success stories often hide.
The true power of Newton's work wasn't merely improved astronomical prediction. Its compelling nature came from unifying three completely separate domains—planetary motion, falling objects on Earth, and ocean tides—under a single, elegant theory. This demonstrates unification as a key heuristic for scientific progress.
Science is not a single path but a vast, branching tree of possibilities. Different civilizations would explore different branches due to unique biases and history. This implies that interstellar contact would unlock enormous gains from trade as societies exchange unique scientific discoveries, incentivizing cooperation over conflict.
The "low-hanging fruit" argument for diminishing returns in science is flawed because it assumes a static problem space. Progress is often explosive when entirely new fields, like computer science, emerge from other domains, opening up a fresh landscape of easy problems where rapid breakthroughs are once again possible.
Henri Poincaré understood relativity's core principles but couldn't abandon his existing expertise. He clung to a complex dynamical explanation for length contraction, a phenomenon Einstein explained simply by rethinking spacetime. This illustrates how deep expertise can trap great minds within old paradigms, preventing breakthroughs.
Initially, the Copernican model was neither simpler (it had more epicycles) nor more observationally accurate than the established Ptolemaic system. The scientific community embraced it centuries before definitive proof, highlighting that progress can be driven by a theory's perceived explanatory potential, not just immediate empirical superiority.
Lorentz developed the math for special relativity first but interpreted it as a physical effect of moving through the ether. The scientific community adopted Einstein's more fundamental rethinking of space and time long before 1940s experiments could empirically distinguish the two, showing progress isn't solely data-driven.
Unlike classic theories based on simple equations, large AI models represent a new kind of scientific object. Rather than being mere predictive tools, they could be a novel form of explanation that we must learn to manipulate through new operations like distillation and merging, much like Mathematica made massive equations workable.
Prout's 1815 theory that atomic weights were whole numbers faced increasingly contradictory evidence for 85 years, as measurements of elements like chlorine moved further from integers. The discovery of isotopes eventually proved him right, showing how a correct theory can survive a long, actively hostile verification loop.