> Heck, many of the Nobel prize winners were ridiculed by their colleagues as borderline wack-jobs at the time they were working on their research. Even after winning the prize, some still were with their later work (Crick's search for consciousness comes to mind, and why it would be so worthless a search does not).
Do you have any good examples of being considered wack-jobs before their winning?
Semmelweis. He never received the Nobel prize, but I think he counts towards the point.
> Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis discovered in 1847 that hand-washing with a solution of chlorinated lime reduced the incidence of fatal childbed fever tenfold in maternity institutions. However, the reaction of his contemporaries was not positive; his subsequent mental disintegration led to him being confined to an insane asylum, where he died in 1865.
Not a Nobel prize winner (somewhat shockingly, given the contribution), and he wasn't (to my understanding) so much ridiculed, but when The Great Debate occurred, which was a debate about whether or not galaxies besides our own existed,
> if Andromeda were not part of the Milky Way, then its distance must have been on the order of 108 light years—a span most contemporary astronomers would not accept.
the size and distance of these objects (galaxies) seemed far too absurdly large to one side of the debate to be accurate; it would mean the size of the universe would be absolutely enormous. Of course,
> it is now known that the Milky Way is only one of as many as an estimated 200 billion (2×1011)[1] to 2 trillion (2×1012) or more galaxies[2][3] proving Curtis the more accurate party in the debate.
It isn't too hard to find examples of scientists who were ridiculed for their ideas and eventually win the Noble prize:
>...Stanley B. Prusiner, a maverick American scientist who endured derision from his peers for two decades as he tried to prove that bizarre infectious proteins could cause brain diseases like “mad cow disease” in people and animals, has been awarded the ultimate in scientific vindication: the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology.
>...Prusiner said the only time he was hurt by the decades of skepticism “was when it became personal.” After publication of an especially ridiculing article in Discover magazine 10 years ago, for example - which Prusiner Monday called the “crown jewel” of all the derogatory articles ever written about him - he stopped talking to the press. The self-imposed media exile became increasingly frustrating to science journalists over the past decade as his theories gained scientific credibility.
>....The recent 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Daniel Schechtman, experienced a situation even more vexing. When in 1982, thirty years ago, he made his discovery of quasicrystals, the research institution that hosted him fired him because he « threw discredit on the University with his false science ».
>...He was the subject of fierce resistance from one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, Linius Pauling, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry and Peace Nobel Laureate. In 1985, he wrote: Daniel Schechtman tells non-sence. There are no quasi-crystals, there are only quasi-scientists!
An example that is pretty well known is Barry Marshall
>...In 1984, 33-year-old Barry Marshall, frustrated by responses to his work, ingested Helicobacter pylori, and soon developed stomach pain, nausea, and vomiting -- all signs of the gastritis he had intended to induce.
>...Marshall wrote in his Nobel Prize autobiography, "I was met with constant criticism that my conclusions were premature and not well supported. When the work was presented, my results were disputed and disbelieved, not on the basis of science but because they simply could not be true."
It was Max Plank who said "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." - so this isn't a new issue and things are probably better now than they were in the past.
Do you have any good examples of being considered wack-jobs before their winning?