Expert Error
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Expert Error consists of serious errors by recognized experts about scientific, engineering or economic theories or possibilities. We start with examples:
- Lord Kelvin claiming heavier than air flight, radio, and radioactivity were impossible.[1]
- Albert Einstein thought nuclear power would never be commercially viable.
- Opposition by experts to the United States Patent Office, because supposedly everything useful has been invented.[2]
- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM in the 1960s, believed there would never be a market for more than a handful of computers in the entire world.
- Irving Fisher, professor of economics at Yale, declared a few days before the 1929 stock market crash, "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. I do not feel there will be soon if ever a 50 or 60 point break from present levels, such as (bears) have predicted. I expect to see the stock market a good deal higher within a few months."[3]
- Philipp von Jolly, professor for physics and mathematics at the University of Munich, advised Max Planck in 1874 not to study physics as almost everything was already discovered, and all that remained was to fill a few unimportant holes.
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See also
References
- ↑ http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~fringwal/stoopid.lis
- ↑ This opposition can be found in many forms, from weakening the strength of patents by small inventors today to repetition of a quote attributed to Charles Duell, Commissioner of the Patent Office, in 1899: "everything that can be invented has been invented." While this quote may be apocryphal, "this saying has been so often quoted that it has been gradually accepted as a truth, and thus being still repeatedly quoted again and again even by prominent scholars." http://www.intertic.org/Policy%20Papers/Pretnar.pdf Bojan Pretnar, "Two Sources of Persistent Patent Controversy," p.4]
- ↑ Quoted on Oct. 17, 1929.