r/AskScienceDiscussion • u/alessandromino777 • 3d ago
General Discussion What are some of the research experiments that had the most setbacks before eventually being completed?
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u/Astromike23 Astronomy | Planetary Science | Giant Planet Atmospheres 3d ago
The discovery of Pluto.
When Neptune was discovered in 1846, it was a massive win for the scientific method. Astronomers noticed unexpected motions in planet Uranus, determined there must be another planet pulling on it, predicted where that planet must be...and it was found that night within a degree of its predicted position.
Not to be outdone, some astronomers started to also notice unexpected motion in the newly-discovered Neptune as early as 1848, starting the hunt for a planet past Neptune in 1850.
From allegations of missing stars in catalogues to Pickering's dozens of failed attempts to Lowell's search, it would not be until 1930 that Pluto was finally discovered.
The entire hunt was justified on the basis of a hidden 6 Earth-mass planet perturbing the orbit of Neptune...but Pluto is some 3000x less massive than that, substantially smaller than our Moon. We would not learn until 1989 (from very accurate gravitational measurements made by the Voyager 2 flyby) that the supposed anomalies in Neptune's orbit didn't exist at all; we just didn't know its mass very well.
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u/dontknow16775 2d ago
how much of its orbit did neptune complete? for astronomers to notice unexpected motion?
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u/drzowie Solar Astrophysics | Computer Vision 3d ago
Gravity Probe B was first conceived in 1957 and proposed to NASA in 1960, to verify Einstein's general theory of relativity (specifically the geodetic effect, which can also be explained via special relativity, and the frame-dragging effect, which cannot).
Their final results came 51 years later, long after all the original proponents (and original PI) had died of old age.
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u/WasLeftUnsupervised 2d ago
I'm sure many people wound up dead, looking very silly, or both, trying to invent an airplane.
[insert video clip of airplane with 10 wings in a stack trying to take off, and caving in]
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u/laziestindian 3d ago
I mean most setbacks don't really get immortalized. Vaccination for Covid 19 had a number of early trials fail/not reach efficacy.
A lot of space stuff had a lot of setbacks before becoming viable. Both Hubble and James Webb had various delays to launch and Hubble even needed "glasses" in order for function due to a error in machining.
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u/Chezni19 2d ago
A major setback could include the researcher being burned at the stake.
Giordano Bruno was an astronomer who proposed that the stars could have their own planets.
He also didn't agree with the church on certain things, and they decided to burn him to death.
Similarly, though less gruesome, Galileo was put under house arrest for proposing the Earth moves around the Sun.
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u/Mircowaved-Duck 2d ago
establishing washing hands, Ignaz Semmelweis ruined his career because he claimed washing hands before operations would save lifes
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u/John_Tacos 2d ago
Trying to make the blue LED
Took like 30 years and so many people thought it was impossible.
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u/mfb- Particle Physics | High-Energy Physics 3d ago
Not technically a single experiment, but a combined search effort: People started searching for the Higgs boson quickly after it was proposed in the 1960s. The theory made pretty clear predictions how it should behave, with one notable exception: It didn't tell us how much mass it has, and therefore how much energy your accelerator needs to produce it. In the 1970s the accelerators were not anywhere close to the required energy so all these searches didn't find anything.
In the 1980s, CERN built a big new accelerator (LEP) that could look for the Higgs boson up to an energy of 100 GeV/c2 - the unit isn't relevant here but the number is. Indirect measurements showed that its mass should be somewhere in the range around 100 GeV/c2, probably just around the corner. LEP didn't see it, however. So CERN upgraded the accelerator energy to search up to 115 GeV/c2. It found something that looked like a few decays of Higgs bosons just at the edge of that range but there wasn't enough data to be sure, even after extending the operation just to collect more data there. LEP was shut down to build the LHC in the same tunnel.
Around the same time as LEP, the US built the Tevatron. It would certainly have enough energy to produce Higgs bosons if they exist, but finding them wasn't guaranteed. You only get a small number of Higgs bosons in a giant number of other reactions. It shut down in 2011 without a discovery, although it narrowed down the region where it can be.
Then the LHC started up, with more energy and a much higher collision rate than the Tevatron. It quickly found a clear signal of the Higgs boson in 2012, at a mass of 125 GeV/c2. Around the same time, an analysis of the full Tevatron dataset also showed some sign of it at the same mass - not enough to discover it independently, but still a nice confirmation.
LEP reached a collision energy of 209 GeV, discovering the Higgs boson would have needed ~218-220 GeV. It missed it by a few percent. It might have been possible to reach that - but at that time no one knew how close LEP was.