/sci/ - Science & Math

There are some parts of contemporary science which came into being only as result of the authors' ignorance of later discoveries, but for whatever reason their ideas never died once discredited. Black holes are a good example, Schwarzschild never would have conceived the idea if he had been aware of the quark degeneracy problem. Thermodynamics becomes somewhat different when the fact of the cosmic background radiation is taken into account, but most scientists still use analytical solutions to thermodynamics problems which were conceived in the context of an impossible universe where 0ºK is the background temperature.
What are some other good examples of this phenomenon?