In the interest of digging up the most famous debunked hoaxes in science and discovery – no Mars microbe (not faked but not confirmed as true or false), Shroud of Turin (how true or how false), alien corpse at Area 51 (unprovable speculation on what’s really there) or whether or not the United States landed on the Moon (as for this last one, we’re pretty sure that happened)…
Shown above here is the “Potato Web Server”.
…Here now are our picks for the 10 greatest shams of science, discovery, and technology of all time, no joke! (Thanks Ekaf)
I showed this to my Mother-In-Law and she thought it was real! She also believed me when I told her that the Internet was a black box on top of Big Ben (thank you IT Crowd!).
Hmm… not all of the ones listed are hoaxes – the iguanadon was just a mistake, shurely?
There’s a lovely hypothesis that a young, creationist Scottish doctor constructed the Piltdown Man to defame those that had mucked in with Darwin, but gained fame and fortune before the thing was discovered and so never let people know it was a fake. The doctor? David Tenn- I mean Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
It’s one of those notions that is a very romantic idea, but whose evidence is entirely circumstantial (like Elizabeth I being a man).
I only had heard about the crop circles and the blondes .. I think Derren would not have disliked/misplaced being one of the first makers of a crop circle …
Another Hoax .. having a big head is equal to being very intelligent …
awww bummer, cold fusion didnt make the list.
Some I have to admit aren’t hoaxes so much as the explanations behind them are really the hoax, like Crop Circles… the circles are there, thats not fake photography or something, just well… it wasn’t aliens thats all…
But the best is ‘Eve’ the Raelian ‘Clonaid’ experiment. I have occaisonal interactions with Raelians, nice people like yer average religious types they just believe in something else… but I wonder if any of them actually believed this one when it came out. Dolly was unique, Eve was finely crafted PR to get people to join up.
Lafayette: Nice hypothesis, except for the fact that Conan Doyle was agnostic in his youth, so he would not have been a firm believer in creationism at that time. He did become a Spiritualist in the late 1910s, but he was middle-aged at that point, so even if we shift his spiritual interests a few years back, the details (young and not-yet-known) don’t work out.
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(I’m researching Conan Doyle’s life for a little project I’m working on
This may sound unbelievable to most (all?) of you but one hoax very likely to be debunked in the future is what’s referred to as “HIV/AIDS”. You probably never heard about the controversy behind the thick curtains of “science” due to media’s bias but the HIV/AIDS science has many gaps and will likely collapse some time in the future… say… 20 years from now… hopefully sooner.
Here’s an overview of what I’m talking about:
http://www.change.org/ideas/view/take_a_new_look_at_the_cause_of_aids?full_thread=true
It might take a while to load due to the number of comments. But if you start reading them from the beginning you’ll realize the heat, the size and importance of this topic. I personally think it will be remembered as one of the darkest episodes of humanity. It’s tragic…
Try to inform yourselves about all this if you can afford to do it please. There’s so much to learn and at times it may seem too hard to believe and understand but please persist if you truly care about it. Because it’s also extremely important for the future of science and human progress.