> > > Exceptions arise only in cases where ideas are much too far ahead of their time. The only example I can think of right now is Leonardo Da Vinci inventing the helicopter, but I'm sure there are better examples. These ideas will seem so far out to contemporaries that they die (only to be resurrected by historians after "the helicopter has been invented", so to speak).
> >
> > Relativity met with a *whole* lot of dissagreement at first. Dissagreement that lasted for decades. When an idea comes out that completely changes the universe, people don't act very kindly to it.
>
> That seems to happen quite a bit in science, when a new theory meets a lot of resistance from the scientific community. Plate tectonics, and natural selection come to mind as other examples. I'm sure there are many others, too.
>
> winter"And rocks falling from the sky"mute

Which is not, on the whole, a bad thing, because many "new and exciting ideas" the media loves to seize on turn out a fairly short time later turn out to be, well, stupid and ridiculous ideas. Pseudoscience is everywhere, and I think it's an overall safer thing for the scientific community to be too conservative than to be too liberal. (One way you're wrong one way for a long time until you change, the other way you'd be wrong almost constantly, in a new way each week.)

The problem is that people, particularly laypeople, *remember* the new and exciting ideas that turned out to be right far better than the ones that turned out wrong. Which leads people to think *every* new and exciting idea could be right and the scientific community is being hidebound and puritanical by requiring such things as peer review and documentation.

Ar"remember cold fusion?"thur