Category: Experiments misread as their opposite

The list below is believed complete, though membership – like everything here – is subject to revision.

George Biddell Airy – The Astronomer Royal whose 1871 aether experiment was rebranded 'Airy's failure' and conscripted, posthumously and without consent, as a flat-earth proof.
Foucault's pendulum – A weight on a wire that reports the Earth's rotation without reference to the sky, at a rate that goes exactly as the sine of the latitude.
Kinematic and dynamic equivalence – Two claims about reference frames: the first true and never disputed, the second contested, the two offered as one.
Newton's bucket – The last of five arguments for absolute space, now quoted alone and in support of the position it opposed.
The Sagnac effect – The fringe shift from sending light both ways round a rotating loop, offered as the disproof of relativity, and in fact a direct measurement of the relativity of simultaneity.
Schrödinger's cat – A thought experiment devised in 1935 to show a reading of quantum mechanics absurd, now the emblem of the reading it was built to ridicule.
Stellar aberration – The annual tilt of every star by the same 20.5 arcseconds, found by a man hunting parallax, and now cited against the motion that causes it.
Vic Tandy – Traced a haunted laboratory to its extractor fan using a fencing foil, and published it in the ghost journal. The famous 19 Hz is 1,139 divided by 60.