All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
-Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788 - 1860)
We've all heard it. Parapsychologists, cold fusion research, UFO fanatics, 9/11 Truthers, and those silly David Icke followers, e.g. ANYONE that's going against the grain and is defending their ideology against criticism (for the record I believe the first 2 are plausible), is almost guaranteed to drag it out at some point. I could make something up right now, something totally absurd, and use that quote like a safeguarding blanket against my radical new idea.
But despite all of its use and misuse, does that make it any less true?
Assume the scientific consensus is the incorrect idea X. Someone comes along and says, X is wrong, Y is true. That person gets laughed all the way home. They get other people researching Y, build support and evidence for Y, and present it to Science again. This time, Science realizes that there may be something to this. But it still goes against everything they know. So they pick it apart with all of their might. Openly denounce it in the journals and magazines. Continue with some of the ridicule. But they are putting up a fight now. Then, over time, as more and more people research Y, they realize Y is in fact true. At some point, Science goes, "Well, bollocks. We were wrong. Y is in fact true." The person to put the final nail in the coffin (sometimes not the person who discovered Y) gets a Nobel. Y is now the new scientific standard. You're a cook and a loony and a pseudoscientist to believe anything else.
Does the course of events in science ever follow this patten? (Obviously, many discoveries are build upon prior discoveries, and therefore are just an extension. But occasionally, something REALLY shakes things up). Let's look at some things that were Idea Y in the past.
Plate Techtonics
Ball Lightning
Meteors
Quantum Mechanics
Relativity (these two to a smaller extent, primarily because there were so few people in the world that actually understood this stuff, and the changeover happened rather fast. But Classical Mechanics was still very widely held)
Wave-particle duality
Anthropogenic Climate Change (actually had a lot of mainstream support from the getgo)
Endosymbiotic Theory
Epigenetics
Cognitive Psychology (as opposed to behaviorism)
And many many more
Sure, I can say that the Hollow Earth is the next big thing that's waiting to be proven, and that doesn't necessarily mean it'll be proven in the future. But of the earth-shaking things that are proven down the road, did all or most go through this process?