The lack of180s partly results from the way that scientific disciplines ground themselves over time. In retrospect, one can’t be surprised that the first experiment to carefully examine the aether failed to find it. But it would be extremely surprising if, after decades of experimental verification, quarks were shown not to exist. In addition, as disciplines grow older and bigger, they end up naturally absorbing people with minority points of view. So instead of entire disciplines executing a U-turn, these minority beliefs shift and twist while becoming acceptable to the majority.[…] Then there is the political influence on scientific180s. In the U.S., politics and science collided right after 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase.[…] The argument over the climate in the plains was an early example of an increasingly common phenomenon: the mismatch between the slow, unsteady movement of scientific understanding and the immediate, short-term imperatives of politics and economics, which can lead to what seem like vertiginous scientific reversals.
