Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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Invented the geodesic dome
Tended to accuse the world of not adopting his innovations because of their hidebound prejudice and inability to think outside the box.
The geodesic dome is widely used when domes are needed, like radar installations and observatories. They are not used more for homes, even though there would be a significant savings in materials, because stuff inside the house has to obey the law of gravity. There's only one shape that fills space compactly and works well with gravity and that's a rectangular solid. Your fridge and cupboards have vertical sides so they can fit side by side with no wasted space, and they both fit nicely up against a vertical wall. Sloping walls, like in a geodesic dome, would create oddly shaped dead spaces. Something built to fill those spaces couldn't easily be fit somewhere else. Other space-filling shapes, of which there are many, have the disadvantage that they all have to be the same size to fill space well. Rectangular objects, on the other hand, can be of very different sizes and fill space tightly.
Then there was the Dymaxion car, a three-wheeled affair with a single steerable wheel in the back. It got a lot of favorable press for doing things like steering into a tight parking space and then swiveling neatly into place. But then it got into an accident (not the fault of the car) and interest evaporated. Clearly the result of society's inability to appreciate innovation, plus the inertia of the big car companies. Or maybe it could have been the fact that the car was butt-ugly, and there are real, and serious, concerns about how stable a three-wheel design could be at highway speeds. Plus, if your right rear wheel goes off the road, the left rear wheel is still there to maintain control. If your only rear wheel goes off the road...?
When people find out I have an interest in polyhedra, they invariably ask me about Buckminster Fuller. Fuller's contribution to the mathematics of polyhedra, apart from working out the geometry of geodesic domes, was precisely zero. I am especially galled by the naming of polyhedral carbon molecules, or fullerenes (often nicknamed buckyballs) after Fuller. Fuller indeed speculated that carbon atoms might arrange themselves into a soccer ball configuration, so there is some justification for the name, but when I think of the mathematicians who made far deeper contributions to the theory of polyhedra without being recognized, it still grates.
Fred Hoyle made a brilliant guess about the fusion of helium in stars and contributed greatly to our understanding of how elements are created in stars. Some people believe he should have gotten the Nobel Prize.
Offsetting his achievements in advancing our knowledge of nucleosynthesis are a bunch of really dreadful wrong guesses, and worst of all, they kept getting worse as time went on. When the recession of distant galaxies was discovered, he disdainfully coined the term "Big Bang" for the idea that everything had once been in a small volume of space. In opposition, he advanced the Steady State Theory, which postulated that atomic particles were created in intergalactic space and that new stars and galaxies evolved to keep space constantly filled to the density we see now. Unfortunately, there is no evidence for the amount of intergalactic gas that would have been required, let alone embryonic galaxies all over the place.
After the Big Bang battle was lost, Hoyle embraced "panspermia," the idea that life was seeded on earth from somewhere else. While it's possible life did come from outside, that merely transfers the problem of chemical evolution somewhere else. Hoyle's arguments against evolution made him a darling of the scientific creationists during the 1970's and 1980's, even though Hoyle was a nonbeliever. His most bizarre claim was that the first fossil bird, Archaeopteryx, was faked and that the feather impressions had been added later.
The overall pattern is of someone who just couldn't accept that his 15 minutes were up.
Dropped out of medical school and wrote a series of very bad novels.
Crichton assumed that the smattering of science he picked up in medical school qualified him to be a scientific spokesperson. He ended his days as a shill for the anti-global warming crowd, making such incredible gaffes as confusing weather forecasting with climate modeling, and claiming that the earth's magnetic field held in our atmosphere.
Created the Prairie School of architecture, which has pervasively influenced architecture in general.
A monument to the fact that being a genius and being a nice person are not necessarily synonymous.
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Created 14 July 2008; Last Update 24 May, 2020
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