I'm amazed that topics I've long taken for granted, like plate techtonics and seafloor spreading, have only been widely accepted for a few decades ... and indeed, 50 years ago such ideas were "new" and "controversial" and even ridiculed / fought against.
I've lived long enough to see a few ideas emerge from fundamental research -- the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary and the Chicxulub meteor impact particularly. The data for the impact came from a 1979 geophysical study, first disclosed to the public in 1981, and dating and likely planetary impacts not disclosed until the early 1990s.
More generally, it's astounding how much human knowledge and understanding have progressed in the past 250 years. I've been going through James Burke's programs, especially Connections and The Day the Universe Changed (the first Connections series is better than either of its sequels, but TDTUC is amazing). And looking at how and when specific inventions and ideas were discovered is really telling.
Another mind bender was the series based on Daniel Yergin's The Prize, telling the story of the discovery and development of oil. I had a similar response to yours: numerous things I'd considered to be perpetual aspects of the landscape were really quite recent. And other aspects -- railroad oil tank cars come to mind -- are largely unchanged from their first emergence in the 1860s.
Speaking of the K-Pg boundary, I just recently read Walter Alvarez' T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, which is a popular account of how the Chicxulub impact theory came about and was ultimately substantiated, with the author himself having been one of the key figures in the proceedings.
Aside from being a really fun scientific detective story, it provides great insight into the application of the scientific method. The impact theory was up against scientific gospel at the time, but it was gospel that had spread for good reasons and had proven very beneficial to the science of geology. It also provided for a trial by fire that ultimately made for a stronger, better-argued theory. Stories of the initial struggle of revolutionary ideas are told frequently, but the challengers tend to be cast as the villains of the piece, or are presented as dimwitted - Alvarez is far kinder to his naysayers, and this angle is very interesting. It's a book about fundamental research, but also about the complexities of science as a human enterprise.
Plus I'm about the right age that I remember reading in kids' science magazines about these discoveries as they were happening, so it made for good nostalgia :).
It's also amazing to look at things that were accepted a few decades ago that are no longer acceptable. For instance, a few decades ago jabbing an icepick into someone's brain via an eye socket and swinging it side by side to destroy frontal lobe tissue was considered to be a valid mental illness treatment [1].
Don't forget that, at the time, transorbital lobotomy was the best treatment available for certain patients, and did actually help people. It was crude and dangerous by modern standards, but it wasn't just superstitious barbarism.
There wasn't any kind of sensible research before lobotomy was widely accepted. Research following up the condition of patients of the most prolific surgeon in England found that about one third benefited, one third was unaffected, and one third suffered. The suffering was often severe as you can imagine when you stir someone's brain with a spike.
People thought it worked but they didn't have anything but their anecdotal evidence to support it. And that was good enough for them to perform thousands of operations.
It is really amazing, that the Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were pretty much accepted science in the 1920's, but it took to the end of 1950's before Continental Drift was accepted.
Nothing will happen to either QM or continental drift. New scientific theories don't suddenly invalidate the otherwise working old ones, they only add more details and refine the modelling of reality.
I'm starting to do some work in QM for my PhD and I can tell you that there is some stuff that will really mess-up QM. Look up "Relevant and irrelevant nonlinear Shrodinger Equations".
That's why I wrote that a new theory can "refine the modelling of reality".
Whatever good predictions the phlogiston theory and whatever phenomena they explained didn't stop working the moment we switched to a next theory. We only found a (much) better model for the observable reality.
My point is that if we replace QM with something else, transistors won't suddenly stop working. The old models and computations will forever remain as good as they're now.
Phlogiston theory never "worked," as demonstrated by the Wikipedia article you linked.
> Eventually, quantitative experiments revealed problems, including the fact that some metals, such as magnesium, gained mass when they burned, even though they were supposed to have lost phlogiston.
I wonder what those things will be in 50 years .. its truly a fascinating mind exercise. I can think of a few things for this list - but alas I believe even mentioning these things in the current environment just means you're going to get flamed for 'not agreeing with what everyone already knows' ..
She is also mentioned on Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. That's a fantastic discovery on proving the theory saying America was once connected to Europe and Africa.
