Readers reply: in 500 years’ time, which current scientific theories will be as discredited as flat Earth theory?

A lot of people thought the world was flat. In 500 years, which current scientific theories will be the same level as the flat Earth theory? Richard Cutsforth is from Chichester.

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Readers reply.

There is a string theory. It's too weird to possibly be right. The princess is whatever.

I would call it dark matter. Science can't measure the mass of all the matter, or the various forms of energy present in the visible universe, so they invented a "magic matter" to fill in the blanks.

How about the big bang theory? Is it a theory? The universe might have been created by a burp from an ancient animal. It's UniBeardronic.

Economics is trickle-down. Mikes005

In 500 years, humans will have proved that intelligence does not reside in us.

Our planet is tailor-made for the survival of all life on the planet. Humans are killing humans in search of control and we are destroying the environment.

I think Crocodile Dundee said it best. It has been there for thousands of years. It's stupid to argue about who owns it.

The metaphor describes humanity as smart as the rock is. Rcamejo.

There was a widespread belief in a flat Earth 500 years ago. Dante's The Divine Comedy, written during the early years of the 14th century and entirely conceived within a spherical-Earth model of the universe, provides an interesting and sometimes surprising window on educated medieval perspectives on the cosmos.

The centre of the planet is where Hell is located, a huge funnel-shaped structure centred under Jerusalem. At the antipodes of Jerusalem, there is an island called Purgatory.

Dante frequently makes reference to how midday on the Tiber equals sunset on the Ganges. When Dante and his guide, Virgil, descend to the deepest pit of the inferno, where Satan stands waist-deep in a frozen lake, and they continue their journey by climbing down Satan's shaggy coat into a cavern below the lake, Dante is dumbstruck suddenly.

They have passed the centre of the Earth, which is where all objects are drawn by gravity, and that's why they shouldn't be surprised. The man is Uppsalaman.

In 500 years, neoliberalism is a theory that is beyond its use-by date. The name is DiogenesPithos.

Materialism is the idea that consciousness comes from something. Platonic thoughts.

It is not a matter of what will be said, but what will be acceptable. Pythagoras believed that the moon and the Earth were spherical. Eratosthenes noted that at midday in one town in Egypt, the sun shone directly down into a well, whereas at a distant town, the light came at an angle. He used this and the distance between the two towns to calculate the diameter of the Earth.

How did he measure the distance between the towns? He paid a person to walk between the two towns and count how many paces it took. The scientific method is typified by the attention to detail and the endless quest for truth.

Did the world pay attention? It didn't fit in with the wisdom that the Earth was flat, which was obvious to anyone who looked at the horizon.

The doctrine of the all-powerful church was violated by Galileo and his heliocentric models. The church ignored their postulations and insisted on its own model. The obsessive attention to superstition and control of the mass, and the endless quest to suppress inconvenient facts, are both examples of major religions.

It is not a matter of being right or wrong, it is a matter of being accepted. If it still exists, humankind will have outgrown the need for religions long before 2521. The LewisWinders.

Most of the above is not true. The church was siding with the majority of the scientific opinion of the day in rejecting Galileo's model. There wasn't enough evidence for heliocentrism. A well-established system that was able to predict astronomy events was the reason whygeocentrism was a simple superstition. The Catholic authorities believed that if it did that then there was no reason to reject it. The proof that the tides are caused by the Earth moving around the sun was not only unconvincing but also wrong.

Jesuits were committed to evidence-based science and gathered a lot of the evidence for heliocentrism over the course of the 17th century. Jonathan CR.

There is no proof that time exists. It might be nice to solve that one, as a fairly rudimentary aspect of our lives and a fundamental aspect of all applied mathematics and sciences.

I am working on a theory that a fitted sheet does not obey non-Euclidean geometry. Here is looking at something.

Capitalism is a valid way of structuring our economic activity and distribution of resources. Our 20th-century ancestors had primitive economic systems.

The nation states are a good structure for investing sovereignty.

The idea that the speed of light is not able to be exceeded may be fanciful. I hope the Alcubierre drive is plausible if the idea is sound. I find the idea that we will never be able to explore the rest of the universe depressing. BostonMatt.

Time travel is not possible according to the theory. 500 years ago, I posted this comment from a post- Covid world. The scientists ran out of Greek letters before the new normal.

Is it five hundred years? There will be many theories about the ancients who built cities and mastered arcane sciences such as manufacturing glass, flying machines and creating artificial light. There will be fables about what happened to them. It was a pleasure to experience it.