[renormalised (Carl)]

I'm not necessarily speaking from an astronomical point of view, but there's plenty of examples from science in general where people who have come across a lot of opposition to their ideas. Although, Nick's example of Subramanyan Chandrasekhar is a case in point. Sir Arthur Eddington went out of his way to castigate Chandrasekhar for his ideas about electron degeneracy and white dwarfs, and being the pre-eminent scientist/astronomer of his day, everyone followed suit. Turns out that Chandrasekhar was right. Lord Rutherford said in the early 1900's that whilst he thought the structure of the atom was interesting, the chances of ever getting usable energy from it would be impossible. 22 years later, they built the first atomic pile under a football stadium at the Uni of Chicago. 3 years after that, they blew Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the outhouse with atomic bombs. Pons and Fleischmann and their "cold fusion" device. They were roundly castigated and vilified by MIT and others, who have invested billions in trying to get normal "hot" fusion to work (for 50 years, to no avail). Mind you, one of the backers of MIT happened to be Exxon-Mobile and Chevron...another conflict of interest there. Funny, how it never stopped over 600 laboratories worldwide from conducting experiments in cold fusion, with most having found the same excess of heat and nuclear byproducts, that certain others "never" found. Seems there's something going on in the experiments and even if it's not strictly nuclear, there's still something occurring that is mimicking the nuclear process.

There are quite a few others, but I can't remember them offhand. It's not only scientist...this sort of behavior occurs in all fields of study. The problem with accepted paradigms is that they become like a religion and when a new idea comes along, the voices of protest can become rather deafening and very "robust" in their response. Often to the point of being overly zealous about defending the status quo.