Einstein killed the planet Vulcan, and the story is a warning for science
The planet Vulcan: a cautionary tale
In 1859, Le Verrier proposed a planet inside Mercury's orbit to explain a tiny orbital anomaly, and over the next forty years at least ten reputable astronomers reported seeing it. Vulcan was never real. Einstein's general relativity explained Mercury's orbit without a new planet. The episode shows how a successful theory, wishful thinking, and the drive to confirm can make scientists find what they are looking for.
Vulcan shows only too clearly that, when we look hard enough for something, we tend to find it — whether it exists or not.
- here_to_learn
Agreeing with the general point but specifically: proposing a new planet in an era when new planets were being discovered periodically is more conservative than upending all of physics. So people were following Occam’s razor there.
- SaberTail
This is one reason science has adopted the notion of a "blind" analysis in which the techniques used to analyze the data are developed without looking at the data. This makes it harder to tweak an analysis to discover what you're hoping to discover.
Usually blind analyses are developed with a mixture of simulated data and known "null" data. For example, if you were developing a blind analysis to look for Vulcan in telescope data, you might create an artificial telescope that renders simulated planets and use that to refine and characterize whatever imaging techniques you're using, and also look apply those techniques to data from real telescopes pointed far away from the sun to make sure they're not finding false positives.
In particle physics, a half century ago, before blind analyses were common, there were a lot of particle "discoveries" resulting from seeing some anomaly in the data, then introducing more and more cuts to refine the data until it was a huge statistically significant peak. But then these would disappear as soon as more data appeared, because ultimately what they'd found was statistical noise.
At least some of the evidence for the Higgs boson comes from blind analyses on LHC data.
- tirutiru
Holy Bader Meinhof effect in action.
I was just skimming through a paper by Dyson (the physicist not the inventor) describing some conjectures in the number theory of partitions and he says: I hope these... do not suffer the fate of the planet Vulkan. I guess he meant that they are attractive at first glance but ultimately amount to nothing.
Cannot remember ever coming across Vulkan before this, ever.