I agree that theories get accepted once there’s sufficient evidence for them.
But the amount of evidence required… the delay, as you say, between an evidenced proposal for a theory and it’s acceptance (both in scientific and mainstream communities)… my question is whether this threshold is higher or delay is greater when the scale at which the theory operates is enormous or tiny.
And so I wonder whether there was more skepticism of evolution, relativity, heliocentrism because of bias against the idea that laws are different at different scales.
Before these theories were accepted in the mainstream, people broadly believed the earth was younger, stars were closer, the earth was younger, and that there was no way that light could have a speed because it would need to be too fast. It’s hard for me to believe that these fundamental biases against extremity would not have delayed these theories’ engagement and acceptance.
Mainstream among scientists was different from political communities. Scientists didn’t have the same expectations (which isn’t to say they never do or didn’t have expectations of their own).
>my question is whether this threshold is higher or delay is greater when the scale at which the theory operates is enormous or tiny.
As I said, the larger the implications of a theory, the more interwoven and difficult to test its implications, the harder it is to rule out alternative explanations
>there was no way that light could have a speed because it would need to be too fast
The speed of light was measured to be in the ballpark of 300 million m/s since the late 17th century. There were a bunch of rather clever ways of estimating it way before Einstein. There wasn’t a consensus frim the time if ancient greece through the 17th century, but since ancient Greece it has been imagined that light might consist of some emissions that take non-zero time to propagate.
I agree that theories get accepted once there’s sufficient evidence for them.
But the amount of evidence required… the delay, as you say, between an evidenced proposal for a theory and it’s acceptance (both in scientific and mainstream communities)… my question is whether this threshold is higher or delay is greater when the scale at which the theory operates is enormous or tiny.
And so I wonder whether there was more skepticism of evolution, relativity, heliocentrism because of bias against the idea that laws are different at different scales.
Before these theories were accepted in the mainstream, people broadly believed the earth was younger, stars were closer, the earth was younger, and that there was no way that light could have a speed because it would need to be too fast. It’s hard for me to believe that these fundamental biases against extremity would not have delayed these theories’ engagement and acceptance.
Mainstream among scientists was different from political communities. Scientists didn’t have the same expectations (which isn’t to say they never do or didn’t have expectations of their own).
>my question is whether this threshold is higher or delay is greater when the scale at which the theory operates is enormous or tiny.
As I said, the larger the implications of a theory, the more interwoven and difficult to test its implications, the harder it is to rule out alternative explanations
>there was no way that light could have a speed because it would need to be too fast
The speed of light was measured to be in the ballpark of 300 million m/s since the late 17th century. There were a bunch of rather clever ways of estimating it way before Einstein. There wasn’t a consensus frim the time if ancient greece through the 17th century, but since ancient Greece it has been imagined that light might consist of some emissions that take non-zero time to propagate.