http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQoNW7lOnT4

Scientists, like politicians, like everyone else, are loath to admit they are or were wrong.

Here is a question. What will be the next big scientific fail?

My guess. Global Warming AKA Climate Change.

A good example of an overturn would be phlogiston.

Many philosophers of science have spilled a lot of ink trying to find a airtight system of criteria for which to determine science – and all have, at best, limited success. You don’t actually have to go too far in the modern sciences to see this problem as alive and vital as ever; the physicists think they are hard science and biology is soft. The biologists think at least they are science and that economists aren’t. Etc Etc.

If you considered your own examples I am sure you would encounter some problems in saying saying why they aren’t science. As Jennifer Welsh pointed out geocentrism has some of the criteria we think of as “scientific” and I know enough to say that vitalism was held by respected authorities (and, if we include the idea of spontaneous generation as a associated or corollary system to vitalism, then some of those respected authorities held professorial positions even).

Instead of urging you to try to wrestle with criteria for your claim – allow me to urge you to reconsider what you think you are loosing. Science does present theories and then tries to disprove them – that is one of our tenets and is, if anything, something we can be proud of. In the course of dreaming up explanations and testing them some will be proved wrong – it is how things go. In this light you can say “Newton’s explanation of gravity as attraction at a distance fell out of favor when Einstein proposed that gravity was really a distortion in the fabric of space and time which acted upon masses.” Your audience will appreciate the maturity with which you handle the situation and you won’t look like a fool the next day when science changes its mind about Einstein’s theories in favor of something even better like string theory.

I wouldn’t completely agree with you there about the geocentrism comment, as per Charles Simonyi’s response to Thayler’s question (though I do agree about the others):

“With the geocentric world it is a different matter — geocentrism was indeed scientifically held (with Ptolemy being the best proponent) and it is indeed false — but not to the same extent as the Peripatetic Mechanics. The real issue was precision of prediction — and the complicated system of Ptolemy gave excellent results, indeed better results than Copernicus (which made the breakthrough idea of Copernicus a difficult sell — just put yourself into the shoes of someone in his time.)

Real improvement in precision came only with Kepler and the elliptical orbits which were arrived at in part by scientific genius, by being a stickler for accuracy, and in part by mad superstition (music of the spheres, etc.) From his point of view, putting the coordinate system around the sun simplified his calculations. The final significance of putting the sun into the center was to be able to associate a physical effect — gravitation — with the cause of that effect, namely with the sun. But this did not really matter before Newton.”