New Scientist | 13 Sept 2010
No matter how elegant or ingenious they may at first seem, most novel scientific ideas turn out to be false. But for a remarkable few, the opposite is the case. Written off when first proposed, they turn out to be not only true but world-changing. In an era when research funding is scarce, these 10 ideas serve as a timely reminder of the value of pure science not only in terms of satisfying our curiosity, but ultimately for its endless practical uses.
Michael Faraday built an electric motor in 1821 and a rudimentary generator a decade later – but half a century passed before electric power took off.
What links modern cosmology to 18th-century musings on billiards? The answer lies in a theorem devised by amateur mathematician Thomas Bayes.
A car with just two wheels looked too terrifying to catch on, but the secret of its amazing balancing act is at the heart of today's guidance systems.
George Cayley knew how to make a plane a century before the Wright brothers took off. If only he'd got the internal combustion engine to work.
The axe was poised over the British Antarctic Survey's ozone monitoring programme when it noticed an awfully big hole in the sky.
They exasperated their 16th-century discoverer, but imaginary numbers have given us everything from quantum mechanics to portable music.
We now know that gene activity can change significantly without changes to DNA – but did a shamed scientist who killed himself in 1926 get there first?
When a 17th-century Dutch draper told London's finest minds he had seen "animalcules" through his home-made microscope, they took some convincing.
Before winning his Nobel prize, Stanley Prusiner was ridiculed for suggesting that a rogue protein caused spongiform brain diseases.
Digital sound was invented in 1937 – decades before the technology to use it had been developed.
