Ever hear of phlogiston? Or miasma, orgone, and luminiferous ether? Didn't think so. These once highly-touted substances are no longer highly touted.
Have you heard of any of these things: phlogiston, orgone, luminiferous ether, alkahest, miasma?
Chances are, with the possible exception of miasma, you haven't, and there's no reason you should have, because they are nothing -- or, to explain more fully -- they are the names of substances once thought to exist but which have since been discredited.
Phlogiston, for example, was coined in 1667 by Johann Joachim Becher, a German alchemist, to describe what he believed was the essence of fire, a substance purportedly present in all combustible material and released as flame during combustion -- but we now know phlogiston is so much hooey.
Orgone was posited in the 1940s by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to describe sexual energy that could be collected for medicinal purposes (if only!).
Luminiferous ether comes from the 16th-century philosopher and mathematician René Descartes to name a supposed medium "more subtle than air" through which light and gravity travel, but its existence has ...
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