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Bad Astronomy has an article about an astronomer who had observational data to suggest he had discovered a planet around another star and published his findings in a peer-reviewed journal. In 1855.
We now know, with further, more accurate observations, that no such planet exists there, and the offsets are the product of uncertainty in the telescopic observations that were, to be fair, done by eye.
But still, despite that, I must tip my hat to Jacob. He did his homework, made the best observations and calculations he could, expressed skepticism in his writing, and came up with what he thought was the best explanation. Mind you, again to be fair, this took a great deal of cleverness to dream up. Perhaps he had been influenced by the recent discovery of Neptune.
If anything, he was guilty of overconfidence in his own measurements. Still, technology eventually caught up with his imagination and we did start to find alien worlds. The field of exoplanet research is now a thriving one, which has moved beyond the simple discovery stage to one where we are beginning to physically categorize and model them.
Not so incidentally, we have since found planets orbiting other stars using the method Jacob pioneered in 1855. He may have been the first person ever to publish this idea, and for that he deserves acknowledgment.
This short video gives some more information and context of the man and his (unfortunately erroneous) discovery. The original paper is also freely available.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday December 12 2016, @05:58PM
The interesting thing, to me, is that even if there's a clear pattern in the data, that doesn't mean the conclusion was right if the mechanism for collecting that data isn't any good.
I was taught this back in high school, though: One of the first physics class experiments involved using a ticker-tape mechanism to time how long it took differently massed but similarly shaped objects to fall from the table to the floor. Our data quite conclusively showed that the heavier objects were consistently hitting the floor sooner than the lighter objects. So we had a brief moment of triumph as we announced "Galileo was wrong! Heavier objects do fall faster!", until the teacher asked us to consider what forms of experimental error might be at work. Which we eventually tracked down to the friction within the ticker-tape mechanism, of course.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.