A catastrophic failure in science is said to occur when a long-established theory that has been embraced by learned advocates is discovered to be at odds with the part of the world it is supposed to explain. In other words, when a view of the world maintained by conventional wisdom is contradicted by the facts of life, polite society is due for a shock of disappointment or worse. It is especially catastrophic if the unmasking occurs long past the point where it is obvious that the predictions of the theory diverge wildly from dependable and repeated observations of indisputably identical quantities. A historical example of such a catastrophe comes from the annals of physics. This experience led to the characterization of such a phenomenon as a catastrophic failure of a scientific theory. The Ultraviolet Catastrophe
The term “ultraviolet catastrophe” was first used in 1911 by Paul Ehrenfest to refer to the gross exaggeration of the radiative power of black bodies by the Rayleigh–Jeans law of blackbody radiation, the conventional wisdom of the time. However, the demise of this theory actually occurred years before 1900 as physicists acquired better instrumentation for measuring the radiative power of black bodies at various temperatures and specific wavelengths and began to recognize the discrepancy. The Rayleigh–Jeans law, named for two of the most respected physicists of the 19th Century, was considered “settled science,” a now hackneyed phrase. And in all due respect, it was the first brave attempt to characterize an important phenomenon mathematically, which it did merely by fitting the few measurements available with an exponential function of wavelength. That its failure to comport with reality was a “catastrophe” was due its sudden but long overdue rejection by physicists in favor of a new “law.” The error, which came to be seen by physicists as outrageous and absurd, appears as the vertical difference between the blue and black lines in the following chart.
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