Actually it was worse than that. The standard story, when I was a lad, was that stomach ulcers happened to type A personalities. That hypothesis seems to have curled up and died, leaving a residue of skepticism about personality based explanations of medical conditions.

Heavier than air flying machines, space travel, the space elevator?

Actually it is takes real scholarship to ferret out the true story of historical examples. For example I read recently about a famous scientist who said, in the 1950's: Man will never travel to the moon.

He actually said: Man will never travel to the moon because getting there will cost as much as a small war.

So we learn that experts often do understand their own field, but when they stray into a different field such as politics (why might politicians fund a space program, and how much would they be willing to pay?) they err.

Here is a double example. Frank Whittle complained that his work on jet engines was dismissed as silly at about the same time that Alfred Wegener was complaining that his theory of continental drift was being dismissed as silly.

Many engineers found the thermodynamics of the jet engine easy to understand and correctly saw that it had to run hot. Efficient jet engines waited on the development of high temperature alloys. Heat and stress cause creep. The existing steel alloys would have slowly gone out of shape at the temperatures needed, and engine parts need to remain accurately the same shape.

Heat and stress cause creep, "solid" objects slowly change their shape. Was this point understood or not? Could people reject Wegener's work as silly because it required solid rock to slowly change shape under heat and stress while rejecting Whittle's work as silly because it required solid steel to retain its shape under heat and stress?

...how do you show that an idea is definitively silly versus relatively silly?

Wide ranging consistency. There should be a uniformity of general principle across diverse fields of study.

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