The woman who saw beneath oceans
skepticblog.org
skepticblog.org
More generally, it's astounding how much human knowledge and understanding have progressed in the past 250 years. I've been going through James Burke's programs, especially Connections and The Day the Universe Changed (the first Connections series is better than either of its sequels, but TDTUC is amazing). And looking at how and when specific inventions and ideas were discovered is really telling.
Another mind bender was the series based on Daniel Yergin's The Prize, telling the story of the discovery and development of oil. I had a similar response to yours: numerous things I'd considered to be perpetual aspects of the landscape were really quite recent. And other aspects -- railroad oil tank cars come to mind -- are largely unchanged from their first emergence in the 1860s.
Aside from being a really fun scientific detective story, it provides great insight into the application of the scientific method. The impact theory was up against scientific gospel at the time, but it was gospel that had spread for good reasons and had proven very beneficial to the science of geology. It also provided for a trial by fire that ultimately made for a stronger, better-argued theory. Stories of the initial struggle of revolutionary ideas are told frequently, but the challengers tend to be cast as the villains of the piece, or are presented as dimwitted - Alvarez is far kinder to his naysayers, and this angle is very interesting. It's a book about fundamental research, but also about the complexities of science as a human enterprise.
Plus I'm about the right age that I remember reading in kids' science magazines about these discoveries as they were happening, so it made for good nostalgia :).
Here's a link to Wikipedia's ISBN page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0375702105
[1] http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/607/in-medicine-wha...
http://bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15629160
There wasn't any kind of sensible research before lobotomy was widely accepted. Research following up the condition of patients of the most prolific surgeon in England found that about one third benefited, one third was unaffected, and one third suffered. The suffering was often severe as you can imagine when you stir someone's brain with a spike.
People thought it worked but they didn't have anything but their anecdotal evidence to support it. And that was good enough for them to perform thousands of operations.
Whatever good predictions the phlogiston theory and whatever phenomena they explained didn't stop working the moment we switched to a next theory. We only found a (much) better model for the observable reality.
My point is that if we replace QM with something else, transistors won't suddenly stop working. The old models and computations will forever remain as good as they're now.
> Eventually, quantitative experiments revealed problems, including the fact that some metals, such as magnesium, gained mass when they burned, even though they were supposed to have lost phlogiston.