> Say all of that after you read the above reference. I'm more than willing to do so. That's not a very good reference, because if you're going to do any in-de

> Say all of that after you read the above reference. I'm more than willing to do so. That's not a very good reference, because if you're going to do any in-depth study of how and why barriers to new ideas crop up repeatedly in the history of science, you need to spend more than a paragraph explaining stuff. (Also, where in hell is Lavoisier? The debunking of phlogiston makes such a wonderful addition to these kinds of lists!) And when you study in depth, "they were persecuted for being right" turns out to actually be at strong odds with the historical data. But hey, where have we heard narrative being more important than facts before... Take the most recent example: Schechtman and quasicrystals. It turns out, if you're not familiar with the field, that there's a mathematical theorem that proves that quasicrystals can't exist. And also it's a field that is notorious for being finicky in experimentation--you need good crystals, which are hard to get. So it's only natural that saying "here's this thing that we know can't exist" is going to get him pilloried for saying so... but that's not really what happened. A lot of people had seen similar things before, so the initial reaction was, while controversial, still had a lot of "hmm, that's funny" reaction rather than outright rejection (note that the paper was accepted without much fuss). Around the same time, Penrose tilings were discovered, which provided clues as to why the mathematical theorem was in fact wrong (it had an assumption that crystals could only be periodic, whereas quasicrystals are aperiodic), and the main organization of crystallographers explicitly changes its mandate to include quasicrystals within 7 years of the original publication--extraordinarily rapid. Sure, Linus Pauling was a very loud and vocal opponent of quasicrystals, and spent the rest of his life trying to prove Schechtman wrong. But the field moved on despite this opposition. There is another point that is often made here: if someone is resorting to citing "Galileo was persecuted for being right!" as a defense for their new scientific theory, they are almost certainly a crank. (See, e.g., https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html).