For the skeptic in you, consider these:

Galileo Galilei's telescope was pronounced a "work of the devil" by the experts of the day. He was nearly burned at the stake for daring to claim that the Earth was round, not flat, and that it orbited the Sun, not vice versa. He spent the remainder of his life under house arrest for daring to speak such 'heresy'. The concept of looking through a tube that would make distant objects appear closer was witchcraft ;while a round earth was counter-intuitive,illogical & impossible... after all, if the earth were round, we would all fall off, or fly into space!

Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most brilliant people in all of history, proclaimed that no one would ever be able to calculate longitude, and certainly not by using a timepiece!

Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, a member of the British Royal Academy of Science stood before that august assembly and proclaimed that he had carefully observed and evaluated the invention of the Wright brothers of the United States, and that he could assure the Academy that such a contraption would never have any practical application.

In the mid 1930's, two of the world's most brilliant physicists, Rutherford and Einstein, predicted that humankind would never be able to extract energy from the atom.

In 1956, the dean of modern quantum theory Niels Bohr and mathematical super genius John von Neumann stood in the lab of Robert Townes at Columbia University and insisted that it was impossible to force photons to align into a coherent beam. By 1962, Townes had built a working laser.

"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance ?that principle is contempt prior to investigation."
Herbert Spencer
(Big Book, Page 184)