Here is another famous example:Chandrasekhar’s limit. Eddington rejected the idea of black holes (“I think there should be a law of Nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way!”). Says wikipedia:
Chandra’s discovery might well have transformed and accelerated developments in both physics and astrophysics in the 1930s. Instead, Eddington’s heavy-handed intervention lent weighty support to the conservative community astrophysicists, who steadfastly refused even to consider the idea that stars might collapse to nothing.
I guess this is not quite what you are asking for, since the math was on Chandrasekhar’s side, and Eddington was pinning his hopes on “new physics”. To be fair, recent discussions about horizon firewalls) could be such new physics.
“I think there should be a law of Nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way!” (Eddington, 1935)
Eddington erroneously dismissed M_(white dwarf) > M_limit ⇒ “a black hole” , but didn’t he correctly anticipate new physics? Do event horizons (Finkelstein, 1958) not prevent nature from behaving in “that absurd way”, so far as we can ever observe?
It’s hard to know what Eddington meant by “absurd way”. Presumably he meant that this hypothetical law would prevent matter from collapsing into nothing. Possibly if Chandrasekhar had figured out the strange properties of the event horizon back in 1935 and had emphasized that whatever weird stuff is happening beyond the final Chandrasekhar limit is hidden from view, Eddington would not have reacted as harshly. But that took another 20-30 years, even though the relevant calculations require at most 3rd year college math. Besides, Chandrasekhar’s strength was in mathematics, not physics, and he could not compete with Eddington in physics intuition (which happened to be quite wrong in this particular case).
Here is another famous example:Chandrasekhar’s limit. Eddington rejected the idea of black holes (“I think there should be a law of Nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way!”). Says wikipedia:
I guess this is not quite what you are asking for, since the math was on Chandrasekhar’s side, and Eddington was pinning his hopes on “new physics”. To be fair, recent discussions about horizon firewalls) could be such new physics.
Eddington erroneously dismissed M_(white dwarf) > M_limit ⇒ “a black hole” , but didn’t he correctly anticipate new physics?
Do event horizons (Finkelstein, 1958) not prevent nature from behaving in “that absurd way”, so far as we can ever observe?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_censorship_hypothesis
It’s hard to know what Eddington meant by “absurd way”. Presumably he meant that this hypothetical law would prevent matter from collapsing into nothing. Possibly if Chandrasekhar had figured out the strange properties of the event horizon back in 1935 and had emphasized that whatever weird stuff is happening beyond the final Chandrasekhar limit is hidden from view, Eddington would not have reacted as harshly. But that took another 20-30 years, even though the relevant calculations require at most 3rd year college math. Besides, Chandrasekhar’s strength was in mathematics, not physics, and he could not compete with Eddington in physics intuition (which happened to be quite wrong in this particular case).