Seeking examples of people smarter than me who got hung up

Newton on alchemy

I don't think that believing in alchemy in Newton's lifetime went against the consensus.

Look up the "Nobel Syndrome," e.g. here: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/11/23/luc-montagnier-the-nobel-disease-strikes/"

And yeah, Linus Pauling.

On a more sinister level, there are people like Peter Duesberg: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Duesberg

Hi, I wrote the post. I want to be good at being wrong, I want to be excellent at it. I aspire to develop habits of thought that will protect me and my peers from nursing too gently the need to be right. I thought I might learn something from the ugliest cases.

What happens to even the greatest minds that causes them to get attached to their theories? I don't know, but your examples will help me find out. A history of baggage? A reputation to protect? Mere age? Pure guts? I agree with pragmatist that Einstein's concerns about QM aren't a great example of the prompt. Hoyle, on the other hand, is a great example --- he resisted the Big Bang to his death --- for decades after it had become the most plausible model.

Each of the bulleted examples up top was a great mind with too much emotional baggage to keep from being left behind by science. I don't want it to happen to me, and generally I want to cultivate in scientific discourse a tone that makes it safe for even the most agitated reasoner to bow out with grace. Thanks for your input and for your leads.

The Monty Hall problem is a classic example of smart people refusing to go against their intuition despite resounding evidence. Paul Erdős refused to accept a formal proof of the solution and only accepted it after seeing a statistical simulation give confirmation. (Source: "The Drunkard'ss Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives" by Leonard Mlodinow.)

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nobel_disease has a tentative list.

Penrose on the human brain doing quantum-gravity-based hypercomputation?

RA Fischer on smoking not causing lung cancer has to be one of the classics.

Einstein + quantum mechanics.

Somewhat exotic and recent example from my field: Don Rubin's claim that adjusting for covariates always reduces confounding bias (it does not). There is a famous Pearl/Rubin argument about this. There is some discussion on Andrew Gelman's blog about it, starting here: http://andrewgelman.com/2009/07/disputes_about/. It's a pretty interesting read (perhaps less so if you aren't familiar with the question or personalities involved), if for no other reason than the anatomy of modern academic disagreements.

Brian David Josephson on parapsychology.

Priestley on phlogiston.

The results of this discussion could go into wiki, probably under "argument by authority".

Mach against atomic theory?

Charles Babbage against Organ Grinders.

Again, from memory (sorry if mistaken): Leibniz and Newton were in disagreement on the nature of the fundamental constituent of our universe. Leibniz thought it monads; Newton thought it Force.

I suppose they were both right (except for the aiua quality Leibniz seemed to think monads possessed, to borrow a concept from Orson Scott Card), though it was not at all obvious at the time - and to some degree still isn't.

B.F. Skinner and the humans as a 'black box'. A subtle shift in the field from Behaviourism to Cognitive Psychology, which has led to the establishment of neuroscience.

My memory fails me, but from recollection I believe Noam Chomsky criticised a 195X paper by Skinner, asserting Skinner's models were inaccurate and not psychologically real. Chomsky thought the behaviourist approach insufficient to fully comprehend the brain, and called for an alternate approach.

Apparently Noam Chomsky criticising B.F. Skinner was a big deal, and the disagreement entered the mainstream news. I cannot recall if they furthered the debate.

I'm not sure if this qualifies.

So which theory are you hung up on / alternatively: what sparked your writing that post?

Phillip Henry Gosse with Omphalos

was an English naturalist and popularizer of natural science, virtually the inventor of the seawater aquarium, and a painstaking innovator in the study of marine biology. Gosse was also the author of Omphalos, an attempt to reconcile the geological ages presupposed by Charles Lyell with the biblical account of creation. After his death, Gosse was portrayed as a despotic father of uncompromising religious views in Father and Son (1907), the literary masterpiece of his son, poet and critic Edmund Gosse.[2]

Newcomb against planes.

Smalley against the possibility of nanotechnology.

We probably shouldn't include modern theorists in the list, for example Fred Hoyle, on the grounds that they may still turn out to be correct, or at least more correct than the theory they opposed. (Consider that Hoyle's creation fields theory is very similar to Hubble's Law; if BBT turns out to be false, Hoyle will be remembered by posterity considerably better than he is regarded today in this matter, even if his theories aren't true either.)

I distinctly recall reading that this was the case with Dmitri Mendeleyev in his later years, but I can't recall with respect to what, and a quick googling isn't resolving the question.