>the ad lectorum (to the reader) that he added to the front of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus that one could regard the heliocentric hypothesis as a mere mathematical model and not necessarily a true representation of the cosmos
But choice of reference frame is arbitrary. Modeling the solar system or even the universe with Earth fixed at the center is just as valid as with the sun fixed at the center. Even today the ad lectorum is not wrong per se!
One 'scientific villain' that occurs to me: Ronald Fisher. He used his considerable influence in the statistics community to suppress Bayesian inference research because he disagreed with the premise of prior probability. Set Bayesian research back decades. He was a strong proponent of the p-value causing some of the reproducibility crisis in scientific publications.
See: "The theory that would not die" by Sharon Bertsch for a very entertaining read of the entire conflict.
Full disclosure: I've published papers in Bayesian statistics.
Without specifically disagreeing with you, the real advance that led to the bloom in Bayesian statistics was fast computers. MCMC and Gibb's sampling, and variational interference are what got the intractable-when-useful field of Bayesian statistics back on its feet.
I think you are certainly right that computation has really permitted Bayes to shine. But I think the stigma against the study persisted for decades: we had Metropolis-Hastings in the 70s, after all.
And as the book argues out, Bayes, even when limited to non-sampling techniques such as conjugate priors, was still useful for a variety of interesting problems in cryptography, search theory, etc.
"Something had to be done, so Midgley took it upon himself to hold a demonstration where he illustrated just how harmless he believed lead to be. He did this by pouring tetra-ethyl lead over his hands and then holding a cup of it under his nose and inhaling it for sixty seconds. Whilst performing this deadly demonstration he was assuring reporters of how he could repeat this practice daily without harm. He did this whilst knowing full-well the dangers of lead poisoning due to having been over-exposed to the substance a few months previous to the demonstration."
Although the TEL seems inexcusable, I'm not convinced that the second point about CFC's is fair.
Yes, they destroy the ozone layer, but that wasn't known at the time Midgley invented them, and they replaced refrigerants that were corrosive and poisonous.
I also question this line: "Beneficial ozone is not terrible abundant, however. If it were distributed evenly throughout the stratosphere, it would form a layer just 2 millimeters or so thick."
How would evenly distributed ozone create a layer? Something seems wrong with the research here.
Lobotomies are definitely worse than adding a misleading preface to a book. Maybe a more precise title for the post would be "the greatest villain in the history of history of science"?
But choice of reference frame is arbitrary. Modeling the solar system or even the universe with Earth fixed at the center is just as valid as with the sun fixed at the center. Even today the ad lectorum is not wrong per se!