It is often overlooked that "scientifically" Chirstopher Columbus was 100% wrong... [View all]
... and the church/great powers that refused him funding were correct to do so:
Columbus thought he could reach India because an Italian geographer, Paolo Dal Pozzo Toscanelli, miscalculated the size of the earth by a factor of 4.
The Church, correctly sticking with Eratosthenes's estimate (mathematically sound and wrong by only 4%, not bad for an ancient greek!), predicted Columbus would never reach India with the ships available at the time, it was simply too far. Had a continent (unknown to both Columbus and the church) not been there, Columbus and his crew would never have returned alive.
So, "Columbus day" should be there to remind us that deep world-changing experimental results come from utterly wrong theories.
Happy bad theoretical physics day.
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