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Comment by nixme | Hacker News Reader

> Most of the great anchievements of mankind 'wouldn't work anyway' in the minds of the specialists of the age. And they were wrong.

Really? Care to provide any examples?

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Storage and use of electricity, the lightbulb, the personal computer, the telephone, and the cathode ray tube.

Plus radio, navigation, flight, supersonic flight, space flight, sattelites, computers that break the 1 GHz clock barrier (remember that one?). I daresay everything that was invented since the Greeks owned the world.

Not to draw it out much further, but I don't think a majority of domain experts in a field would (or have in the past) completely discounted the possibility of an invention or achievement. It's usually journalists, pseudo-intellectuals, or self-proclaimed experts who make these types of claims. Are you saying that leading physicists and engineers in the mid-20th century didn't think space flight and satellites were achievable?

You're going too little backwards in time. Spaceflight was proposed in the begining of the 20th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard#A_Method_of_R...

And yes, it was very criticized at the time but as you said, mainly by the media, as it seems. I doubt, however, that they did it without any backing.

And I was wrong about satellites, it seems. I was pretty sure that the idea of using them as communications relay was also dissed, but I couldn't find any references about it.

I can, however, give you one solid example of something that was completely discredited by the scientists, which is flight. It was widely believe at the time that no object heavier than the air could fly.

I don't believe that 'people' ('scientists') thought birds could not fly, or were lighter than air.

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