There were similar insights that came from the debunking of some of the group’s thought experiments, so while they didn’t actually nail those insights down, they forced the issues to the point where those breakthroughs happened. Again, that’s a pretty good legacy. I like to think of them as productive mistakes. They were wrong far more often than they were right, but so are all scientists and indeed humans, and some of their mistakes were remarkably fruitful: the very act of elucidating the error meant that the entire community learned something.
They’re interesting to me for another reason as well. They provide a window onto what it meant to grow up in the world of physics during a period of very rapid change, as entrenched assumptions of what it meant to do physics and the questions it could ask were suddenly up for grabs and were being redefined. So the group became helpful to me as a historian for mapping large-scale changes in history, politics and intellectual life by showing how these marginal figures could illuminate what was seen as mainstream. The point is not to argue that this group singlehandedly changed the face of physics, and the title is meant to be tongue in cheek, but I think there are genuine intellectual legacies that emerged from their efforts during a very colorful period.