Scientific blunders : a brief history of how wrong scientists can sometimes be-- / Robert M. Youngson.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 327-330) and index.

Star errors -- They laughed at Wegener -- The flat earth theory -- Getting the calendar wrong -- Why is the sky dark at night? -- Lord Kelvin's time-bomb fizzles out -- The CIA and UFOs -- The great Lamarck blunder -- Soapy Sam's defeat -- Who was G.W. Sleeper? -- Piltdown -- What killed the dinosaurs -- Hero and the prime mover -- A galvanic error -- Perpetual motion -- Which way is down? -- Newton got it wrong -- The great AC/DC blunder -- The heat fallacies -- The n-ray blunder -- The importance of ether -- Atomic notions -- The cold fusion affair -- Euclid got it wrong -- Any fool can use the differential calculus -- The destruction of Alan Turing -- The millennium date blunder -- The four elements -- The historical oxygen blunder -- A pathological modesty -- Alchemy's failure -- Isaac Newton, alchemist -- A martyr to chemistry -- Spermatic homunculi -- Wishful thinking of a biologist -- The protein gene blunder -- Francis Galton's great misconception -- The Lysenko blunder -- The wrong dogma -- The SV40 near miss -- Magnets for toothache -- The opium blunder -- The Charcot shaker and the Tourette trembler -- The syphilis scandal.

Describes cases where the brightest scientific minds reached wrong conclusions from the belief that the earth is flat to the cold fusion affair in the 1980s.

Adult Follett Library Resources.