Mistakes made by the most well-known scientists

Everybody makes mistakes. Sometimes you leave the lights on at home, other times you might say, "Thanks, you too," when your server wishes you a good meal. On other occasions, however, mistakes can have earth-shattering consequences and can be perpetuated for centuries.

The greatest minds in history were still only as good as the information and instruments available to them. Who are we to blame ancient astronomers for believing the earth was the center of the universe, or that the universe only stretched as far as the eye could see? Thankfully, humanity continues to learn from its mistakes, but it's always good to remind ourselves of some of the more consequential blunders.

Read on to learn about 15 times scientists missed the mark.

Irreversible cell differentiation

The world of stem cell research is confusing enough to make anyone's head spin, but the idea of irreversible cell differentiation was widely believed until recently. Simply put, this is the idea that once a stem cell, which has the potential to become any other type of more specific cell, e.g. a skin cell, is unable to revert or change into any other cell.

This was widely accepted as fact until the 1990s, when cloning technology began to emerge and it was proven that differentiated cells could in fact still be manipulated. The cloning of Dolly the sheep (pictured) was a landmark victory in proving this new theory as fact.

Spontaneous generation

Aristotle, considered one of the greatest minds in all of history, wasn't always right. One idea of Aristotle's that didn't quite survive the test of time, although it was taken as fact for nearly two millennia, was that of spontaneous generation.

Phrenology

Phrenology, a practice once wildly popular in the 19th century that is now widely considered mere pseudoscience, claimed that an individual's personality, temperament, and demeanor could all be revealed through the measurements of one's head.

Geocentric theory

Today, it's common knowledge that the earth and the rest of our solar system's planets revolve around the sun. This widespread knowledge is thanks to the Renaissance astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who introduced his heliocentric theory to the world in 1453.

Before Copernicus, however, all of Europe and most of the world believed that not only the sun and the stars, but the entire universe, revolved around the earth, which was believed to be at the center of the universe. This completely inaccurate view of the universe, popularized by the Greek-Egyptian mathematician Ptolemy, was the accepted theory of the universe for over a thousand years.

Phlogiston

In the 17th century, the field of chemistry as we know it today, that is separate from ideas like alchemy and the Philosopher's Stone, was still relatively young, and creativity played a big role.

In 1667, German chemist Johann Becher (pictured) suggested the existence of a substance called "phlogiston." According to Becher, phlogiston was to blame for fires, combustion, and rust. In order to put out a fire, all that was needed was to simply "dephlogisticate" it. About a century later, in 1774, Joseph Priestley's discovery of oxygen made the phlogiston theory immediately obsolete.

The Piltdown Man

The fiasco of the skull of the famed Piltdown Man all began in 1912 when the now-disgraced archaeologist Charles Dawson claimed to have found a skull from the ever-elusive "missing link" in human evolution.

The age of the earth

Countless scientists throughout history have adjusted the earth's birthday, as more and more information came available. In the 1700s, a French scientist named Georges-Louis Leclerc estimated the earth was a relatively infantile 75,000 years old.

The blank slate theory

Widely respected in his time, English philosopher John Locke developed his theory of tabula rasa, or the "blank slate" theory. This theory suggests that humans are born without innate instinct or thought and that everything is learned from outside influences. It was the most pro-nurture defense in the argument of nature versus nurture.

Einstein's Universe

In 1917, one of the world's greatest minds, Albert Einstein, proposed an entirely inaccurate model of the universe that suggested the universe was in a perpetually stationary state, was neither contracting nor expanding, and never would.

Planet Vulcan

A century before Einstein's theory of relativity explained some of the greatest questions of the universe, a French astronomer named Urbain Le Verrier (pictured) was busy studying the orbits of the planets, and even deduced the existence and near-exact position of Neptune through pure mathematics.

The growing earth theory

Before the discovery of the tectonic plates and the advent of tectonics, Charles Darwin suggested that the disconnection of the modern continents was caused by a previously unified landmass being torn apart not through tectonic movements, but by the gradual growth of the earth.

The creation of killer bees

Killer bees, as much as many would love for them to be a hoax, are in fact very real. They were created, on purpose, by scientists in Brazil in the 1950s who thought that by breeding docile European honeybees with their more aggressive, but more weather-adjusted African cousins, they could craft a bee perfect for honey production in Brazil.

The fen-phen diet

Diet fads are always to be considered with a grain of salt, and diet pills even more so. One of the largest fads in the 1990s was known as the "fen-phen" diet. It was meant to combine two pharmaceuticals to create a miraculously fast and painless path to weight loss.

The MTBE problem

In the 1970s, gas and oil companies started putting methyl tertiary butyl ether, or MTBE, into gasoline. The idea was that the addition of MTBE would cut down on pollutants released by the burning of gas. Unfortunately, there were some unforeseen side effects.

The Milky Way as the entire universe

One of the largest and most pressing questions of early 19th-century astronomy was just how big the universe was, and how far away from Earth were the strange, cloudy objects that we now know as nebulae. A large number of the scientific community believed that, whatever they were, those celestial objects must be at least within our galaxy, because our galaxy was the extent of the entire universe.