Interesting question

Quote: Nareed

(it had a name, but I forget)

or later on applying all sorts of light rays (in imitation of X-rays).

Phrenology is what you were thinking of.

Careful with that light rays stuff..... applying infra red light to a wound was seriously investigated only because surgery on very valuable race horses was too risky. Once it worked on expensive racehorses it filtered down to ordinary patients.

Quote: pew

Can't believe I forgot the biggest scam yet, SETI. Pseudoscience at it's worst. Playing on peoples hopes and imaginations to keep the taxpayer funds coming into NASA.

I don't know if NASA is involved in SETI at all, and certainly the NASA budget is munificent compared to expenses for SETI.

And it's not pseudoscience, although the public conception of it is highly misleading. For instance, it can only look where the radio telescopes can point (well, duh!), and regular broadcast signals are not that strong or coherent. In fact, using Earth as a standard, we couldn't find ourselves if we were looking from a certain distance away (I forget how far).

Still, there are such things like radar. Any radio telescope can pick them up, and they're stronger than broadcast signals. But they carry no information. If you detected a world 1,000 light years distant using radar regularly, you might prove intelligent life is there, or was there, but you'd glean little information about it.

There are many facets to ET. Movies, books, constant articles on yahoo ect. all to keep space exploration in the public eye so the people involved in the industry can keep their cushy jobs at the expense of the taxslave. If the private sector wants to fund that nonsense fine but government has no business getting involved.

But, as regards invention, can you have 99 failures before a workable product?

Now if someone declares a scientific effort useless after 98 tweaks to make theory workable...that in itself also teaches a lesson.

In fact, not too long ago (and I can't remember what right at the moment) a new discovery was made because no one bothered to check one particular method.

You do need some dogged researchers, or you will miss something which you might have discovered sooner. Yes, they could be spending years going up a blind alley and totally wasting money and end up coming up with nothing.

Quote: rxwine

In fact, not too long ago (and I can't remember what right at the moment) a new discovery was made because no one bothered to check one particular method.

This happens often. The cellular cytoskeleton was discovered because a university teacher had the wrong setting for contrast in a video camera attached to a microscope.

Quote:

You do need some dogged researchers, or you will miss something which you might have discovered sooner. Yes, they could be spending years going up a blind alley and totally wasting money and end up coming up with nothing.

True. when a theory makes a prediction, it's amazing to what lengths scientists will go to prove it. When the prediction seems wrong, they go to even greater lengths to find out why, and sometimes what everyone was looking for simply wasn't there. That happened with mercury's orbit. The orbit as predicted by Newton's theory of gravity did not match the orbit as observed. The accepted and reasonable explanation at the time, late XIX Century, was that an unknown planet lurked inside Mercury's orbit (a planet there would be hard to spot in the Sun's glare). It took decades of looking, using all the tools available, before astronomers were convinced no planet was to be found there. The answer came when Einstein formulated the theory of general relativity.

For all the talk about dark matter, I think what's really interesting is dark energy. Consider that the description of it we can garner through observation suggests impossible things. Such as the force, or whatever it is, becomes stronger the farther away two objects are from each other. Imagine you have a puny flashlight and are trying to illuminate a book page by placing the flashlight close to its surface. It barely provides enough light to make out words. Now take the flashlight, still pointed at the book, and place it on Pluto while the book remains with you on Earth. Now there's enough light to make the whole room bright as a sunny day! Take it farther away, say to another galaxy, and the light is bright enough to produce heat that will melt the room.

That further extends a comment I heard about the theory of special relativity: it's not hard to understand, it's hard to believe.

Another interesting bit (literally) from Cosmic Yarns:

http://www.cosmicyarns.com/2016/07/help-one-of-our-stars-is-missing.html#more

A star has gone missing (read my comment in the blog for two possible explanations).

Other possibilities includes a new type of star which goes dim for some reason, a new type of nova that was brighter back then but not recognized as a nova, observational/recording error, swallowed by a black hole no one expected (though that takes much longer to happen), a dust cloud that is now obscuring that star, some type of extreme gravitational lensing bending the light away from Earth, and lots more exciting and mundane things.

It is worth looking into.