It was the early historian of science, the French physicist and mathematician Pierre Duhem (1861-1916), who, while researching the history of statics and classical mechanics in physics, first found a connection to the past that had been largely ignored for ideological rather than scientific reasons. He was looking at the work of the scientists of the Scientific Revolution: Newton, Bernoulli, Galileo and the rest, and in reading their work, was surprised to find references to earlier scholars working in the supposedly science-free zone of the Middle Ages.
Duhem was a meticulous historical researcher and fluent in Latin, so he proceeded to do what no historian had done before — he actually read the work of Medieval physicists: i.e. Roger Bacon (1214-1294), Jean Buridan (c. 1300- c. 1358), and Nicholas Oresme (c. 1320-1382). He was amazed at their sophistication, and so he began a systematic study of the Medieval scientific flowering of the Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries.
As a renowned physicist of his day, Duhem was in a unique position to assess the sophistication of the works he was rediscovering. He recognized these Medieval scholars had been the ones to discover elements in physics and mechanics that had long been attributed to much later scientists like Galileo and Newton. There is even the possibility that Galileo took some of his work from the earlier work of the Merton Calculators. The Oxford Calculators.
This did not sit well with the scientific elite of his time, and his publishers were pressured not to publish the later volumes of his Systeme de Monde: Histoire des Doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic. The establishment of the time was not comfortable with having the idea of the Middle Ages as a scientific dark age being overturned. It undermined the narrative of how the scientific revolution was born.
Duhem died with his painstaking work largely unpublished in 1916.
It was only through the efforts of his daughter Helene and a 30 year long struggle for her father's opus, that it ever saw the light of day. The whole 10 volume work was finally released in 1959.
So, if you don’t think that’s actually scientific resistance, there’s always this one.
When Albert Einstein’s 1905 paper on “special relativity” was first published, it was met with resistance in Britain, because it was seen as a direct challenge to the widely accepted theory of ether—the medium that scientists believed filled space. British physicists had a theoretical commitment to the concept of ether. This scientific status quo was so firmly entrenched that Einstein’s groundbreaking theory fell on deaf ears there for several years. As late as 1923, a British physicist despaired that his contemporaries were still “ignorant of Einstein’s work and not very much interested in it.”
British physicists Ebenezer Cunningham and Norman R. Campbell were at first quite lonely introducing Einstein to their countrymen and challenging the “ethereal” view. Campbell seems to have been the only anti-ether voice from 1905 to 1911.
In the US, relativity was generally ridiculed as “totally impractical and absurd.” In France, Einstein was simply ignored until he visited in 1910. The only place he seems to have been understood immediately was in Germany, where his theory was “discussed, criticized, elaborated upon, and defended.”
It seems as though scientific breakthroughs should sweep quickly to universal acceptance where everybody cheers for their brilliance and says, “Eureka!” And while that does on occasion happen, it is not always the case. Sometimes scientists have too much invested in the status quo to accept a new way of looking at things. In those cases, scientific progress is made one funeral at a time—theories are accepted after their most virulent opponents die.