Copyright © 2026 OyList. All Rights Reserved.
Share
Items19
1
Johannes Kepler
Born
Johannes Kepler spent years trying to fit the orbit of Mars to circles, as astronomers had done since antiquity, using Tycho Brahe's precise observations. A persistent mismatch of eight minutes of arc would not go away, and he refused to ignore it. In Astronomia Nova in 1609 he set out his failed attempts in detail before concluding that the orbit is an ellipse.
More about Johannes Kepler2
Thomas Henry Huxley
Born
Thomas Henry Huxley had been openly sceptical of earlier theories of the transmutation of species, reviewing them harshly in the 1850s. Reading Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859 changed his mind, and by his own later account he thought "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!" He became Darwin's most combative public defender.
More about Thomas Henry Huxley3
Charles Lyell
Born
Charles Lyell, the leading geologist of his age, argued against the transmutation of species in his Principles of Geology for over thirty years, even though his ideas about slow change had shaped Darwin's thinking. His 1863 book on human antiquity disappointed Darwin with its caution. In the tenth edition of the Principles, published in 1866 to 1868, he finally endorsed evolution and rewrote chapters he had defended for decades.
More about Charles Lyell4
Wilhelm Ostwald
Wilhelm Ostwald, a founder of physical chemistry, was the best-known opponent of atoms around 1900, arguing that chemistry should be built on energy alone. In 1909, in the preface to a new edition of his textbook, he wrote that experiments by Jean Perrin on Brownian motion and by J. J. Thomson on the electron now gave proof of the atomic nature of matter. He won the Nobel prize in chemistry the same year.
More about Wilhelm Ostwald5
Thomas Hunt Morgan
Born
Thomas Hunt Morgan was openly sceptical in the 1900s of both Mendel's laws as a general explanation and the idea that genes sit on chromosomes. In 1910 a single white-eyed male fruit fly in his Columbia laboratory showed a pattern of inheritance tied to sex, and he changed course. With his students in the "fly room" he went on to map genes on chromosomes, winning the Nobel prize in 1933.
More about Thomas Hunt Morgan6
Robert Millikan
Born
Robert Millikan spent about ten years testing Einstein's equation for the photoelectric effect, expecting to show it was wrong. His 1916 results confirmed it precisely, and he published them as they were. He accepted the equation while remaining doubtful for some years about the light particles behind it, an honest example of evidence winning a partial, not total, change of mind.
More about Robert Millikan7
William Bateson
William Bateson, who coined the word genetics and championed Mendel in Britain, long rejected Morgan's theory that genes are carried on chromosomes. After visiting Morgan's laboratory at the end of 1921 and seeing the fly work for himself, he publicly acknowledged in 1922 that the chromosome theory had to be accepted, while saying he still had reservations about its details.
More about William Bateson8
Niels Bohr
Born
Niels Bohr resisted Einstein's light particles for years, and in 1924 he, Hendrik Kramers and John Slater proposed a theory that gave them up at the cost of energy being conserved only on average. Experiments by Walther Bothe and Hans Geiger, and by Arthur Compton and Alfred Simon, showed in 1925 that energy is conserved in each collision. Bohr promptly accepted the result and abandoned the theory.
More about Niels Bohr9
Albert Einstein
Born
Albert Einstein added a cosmological constant to his equations in 1917 to keep the universe static, and at first dismissed Alexander Friedmann's and Georges Lemaître's expanding solutions. After Edwin Hubble's measurements of receding galaxies, and a visit to Mount Wilson, he publicly dropped the constant in 1931. He also withdrew a mistaken 1936 claim that gravitational waves could not exist once a colleague showed him the error.
More about Albert Einstein10
Arthur Keith
Born
Arthur Keith, among Britain's most powerful anatomists, dismissed Raymond Dart's 1925 claim that the Taung child skull was an early human relative, calling it closer to an ape. As Robert Broom found adult australopithecine fossils in South Africa, Keith changed his view, and in 1947 he wrote publicly that Dart had been right and he had been wrong. He had also been among those taken in by the Piltdown hoax, exposed in 1953.
More about Arthur Keith11
Richard Doll
Born
Richard Doll began his 1948 study of lung cancer with Austin Bradford Hill suspecting that road tar and car exhaust fumes were the main cause, and he smoked himself. The interviews with London hospital patients pointed so clearly at cigarettes that he changed his view, published the link in 1950 and gave up smoking. The British Doctors Study that followed made the case beyond reasonable doubt.
More about Richard Doll12
John Tuzo Wilson
Born
John Tuzo Wilson, a leading Canadian geophysicist, argued through the 1950s that continents were fixed and the Earth was contracting. New evidence from ocean-floor magnetism and seafloor spreading persuaded him around 1960 that continents move. He became one of plate tectonics' most important builders, proposing transform faults in 1965 and the hotspot explanation of island chains such as Hawaii.
More about John Tuzo Wilson13
Dennis W. Sciama
Born
Dennis Sciama, the Cambridge cosmologist who supervised Stephen Hawking and Martin Rees, was a committed supporter of the steady state theory of an eternal, unchanging universe. After the discovery of the cosmic microwave background in 1965, and counts of radio sources that did not fit, he publicly abandoned it in favour of the Big Bang. He later described giving it up as a painful loss.
More about Dennis W. Sciama14
Stephen Schneider (scientist)
Stephen Schneider co-wrote a 1971 paper with S. Ichtiyaque Rasool suggesting that a large rise in airborne pollution particles could cool the planet enough to matter. He soon found the model had overstated the aerosol effect and understated the warming from carbon dioxide, said so in print, and by the mid-1970s was warning about global warming. He spent the rest of his career explaining climate uncertainty to the public.
More about Stephen Schneider (scientist)15
Stephen Hawking
Born
Stephen Hawking argued for decades that information swallowed by a black hole is destroyed for ever, and in 1997 he and Kip Thorne bet John Preskill that this was so. At a conference in Dublin in 2004 he announced he had changed his mind and conceded the bet, handing Preskill a baseball encyclopedia from which information could be retrieved. Physicists still debate the details of how information escapes.
More about Stephen Hawking16
James Lovelock
Born
James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis, predicted in his 2006 book The Revenge of Gaia that billions would die and only a few breeding pairs might survive in the Arctic by the end of the century. In 2012 he told interviewers he had been too alarmist and had made a mistake about how fast warming was happening, while still accepting that it was real and serious.
More about James Lovelock17
Richard A. Muller
Born
Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist, had publicly criticised the methods behind global temperature records and set up the Berkeley Earth project, part funded by climate-sceptic donors, to check them independently. In 2012 he wrote in the New York Times that his own team's analysis had changed his mind: the Earth's land had warmed by about 1.5 degrees Celsius over 250 years, and humans were almost entirely the cause.
More about Richard A. Muller18
Paul Steinhardt
Born
Paul Steinhardt was one of the founders of the theory of cosmic inflation in the early 1980s. He later concluded that the theory, as usually formulated, makes no firm predictions because it can produce almost any universe, and from around 2013, with Anna Ijjas and Abraham Loeb, he argued in papers and in Scientific American that it is in trouble. He now works on bouncing cosmologies instead.
More about Paul Steinhardt19
Daniel Kahneman
Born
Daniel Kahneman's bestselling Thinking, Fast and Slow in 2011 presented research on behavioural priming as results readers had to accept. As many of those studies failed to replicate, he wrote in a public comment in 2017 that he had placed too much faith in underpowered studies and that the chapter should not be relied on. He had already, in 2012, urged priming researchers to replicate their own work.
More about Daniel Kahneman
