[apo]

Can't help but think of phlogiston:

Eventually, quantitative experiments revealed problems, including the fact that some metals gained mass when they burned, even though they were supposed to have lost phlogiston. Some[who?] phlogiston proponents explained this by concluding that phlogiston had negative weight;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory

Eventually, the mass paradox was resolved by the realization that combustion is really something else altogether: the combination with a then-unknown element, oxygen:

Phlogiston remained the dominant theory until the 1770s when Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier showed that combustion requires a gas that has mass (specifically, oxygen) and could be measured by means of weighing closed vessels.

[JumpCrisscross]

Side note: it’s pretty incredible how phlogiston theory correctly linked burning and rusting, despite being unaware of oxidation. (Also, that plants have a part to play in the oxidation-carbon cycle.)

I don’t know if oxygen theory would have developed without phlogiston theory first linking these phenomena.

[lisper]

Almost certainly. Joseph Priestly, the discoverer of oxygen, was a confirmed phlogistonist. He even called oxygen "de-phlogisticated air". The reason oxygen theory wasn't developed sooner was technological limitations, not intellectual ones: scientists simply didn't have any way of preparing pure oxygen to experiment on before Priestly.

(FYI, I just happen to know all this because I'm in the middle of preparing a series of lectures on the history of science, and I just finished the segment on the atomic theory. It's a really fascinating story.)

[narrator]

The Egyptians and Babylonians didn't really technologically advance much for 1000 years. They placed the most emphasis in their society on maintaining the social order above all else.

Progress can be stopped if you interfere properly with disruptive advances in science. Much of the world is still trying to roll back the development and widespread dissemination of small arms technology because it interferes too much with the maintenance of social order. The last major physics discovery gave us atomic weapons. Who knows what deadly forces future advances in physics would unleash? Heaven forbid they were easy to engineer! Perhaps it's in the interest of national security to direct fundamental physics research into "how many angels can fit on the head of a pin" type discussions via directing grant money such as we see with string theory. These endless manipulations of already existing knowledge and an aversion to more daring experimentalism should keep scientists from developing the successors to atomic weapons.

[simonh]

It’ll keep scientists in the countries that do this from discovering such weapons. Meanwhile elsewhere in the world...

[narrator]

What if they've already developed these weapons, but don't find it useful to let the rest of the world know about them? For example, there's the mystery of the very real, but unexplained brain injuries to diplomats at the U.S embassies in China and Cuba.