No small part of science's labor is devoted to knocking down hypotheses which have been more or less skeptically erected, not with any notion of permanence, but as a sort of scaffolding to bridge gaps which could not be filled with the instruments and information at hand. Example: splitting the light of distant nebulae in their spectroscopes, astronomers got spectrum lines which they could assign to no known element. Accordingly they created by mutual consent a new element, called it "nebulium," and doubted that it existed. Years later they found "nebulium" to "be...
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