
Andreas Osiander: The greatest villain in the history of science? - Hooke
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2015/12/19/the-greatest-villain-in-the-history-of-science/
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IIAOPSW
>the ad lectorum (to the reader) that he added to the front of Copernicus’ De
revolutionibus that one could regard the heliocentric hypothesis as a mere
mathematical model and not necessarily a true representation of the cosmos

But choice of reference frame _is_ arbitrary. Modeling the solar system or
even the universe with Earth fixed at the center is just as valid as with the
sun fixed at the center. Even today the ad lectorum is not wrong per se!

~~~
ikeboy
[http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2005/10/03/does-
the...](http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2005/10/03/does-the-earth-
move-around-the-sun/)

See also [http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10933/why-do-
we-s...](http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10933/why-do-we-say-that-
the-earth-moves-around-the-sun) with several good answers.

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arcanus
One 'scientific villain' that occurs to me: Ronald Fisher. He used his
considerable influence in the statistics community to suppress Bayesian
inference research because he disagreed with the premise of prior probability.
Set Bayesian research back decades. He was a strong proponent of the p-value
causing some of the reproducibility crisis in scientific publications.

See: "The theory that would not die" by Sharon Bertsch for a very entertaining
read of the entire conflict.

Full disclosure: I've published papers in Bayesian statistics.

~~~
skj
Without specifically disagreeing with you, the real advance that led to the
bloom in Bayesian statistics was fast computers. MCMC and Gibb's sampling, and
variational interference are what got the intractable-when-useful field of
Bayesian statistics back on its feet.

~~~
arcanus
I think you are certainly right that computation has really permitted Bayes to
shine. But I think the stigma against the study persisted for decades: we had
Metropolis-Hastings in the 70s, after all.

And as the book argues out, Bayes, even when limited to non-sampling
techniques such as conjugate priors, was still useful for a variety of
interesting problems in cryptography, search theory, etc.

------
mpweiher
TL;DR: No.

~~~
chris_wot
Yeah, that title belongs to Andrew Wakefield.

~~~
hjek
Thomas Midgley Jr. is also a good contender:
[http://www.psychedelicporcupine.co.uk/2010/05/thomas-
midgley...](http://www.psychedelicporcupine.co.uk/2010/05/thomas-midgley-jr-
the-worlds-most-destructive-man/)

"Something had to be done, so Midgley took it upon himself to hold a
demonstration where he illustrated just how harmless he believed lead to be.
He did this by pouring tetra-ethyl lead over his hands and then holding a cup
of it under his nose and inhaling it for sixty seconds. Whilst performing this
deadly demonstration he was assuring reporters of how he could repeat this
practice daily without harm. He did this whilst knowing full-well the dangers
of lead poisoning due to having been over-exposed to the substance a few
months previous to the demonstration."

~~~
ddayutah
Although the TEL seems inexcusable, I'm not convinced that the second point
about CFC's is fair.

Yes, they destroy the ozone layer, but that wasn't known at the time Midgley
invented them, and they replaced refrigerants that were corrosive and
poisonous.

I also question this line: "Beneficial ozone is not terrible abundant,
however. If it were distributed evenly throughout the stratosphere, it would
form a layer just 2 millimeters or so thick."

How would evenly distributed ozone create a layer? Something seems wrong with
the research here.

