>Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-live cats as a serious possibility; on the contrary, he intended the example to illustrate the absurdity of the existing view of quantum mechanics.
>However, since Schrödinger's time, other interpretations of the mathematics of quantum mechanics have been advanced by physicists, some of which regard the "alive and dead" cat superposition as quite real.

Dark matter became "real" through the same mechanism, sycophants and posers from the following generation of scientists mistook a though experiment illustrating absurdity of the scientific interpretations of the era as a description of reality.
How common is this pattern in science? Are there other examples?