Education

"Such a condition would imply that we occupy a unique position in the universe, analogous, in a sense, to the ancient conception of a central earth. The hypothesis cannot be disproved but it is unwelcome and would be accepted only as a last resort in order to save the phenomena. [...] But the unwelcome supposition of a favoured location must be avoided at all costs." Edwin Powell Hubble

"Now at first sight, all this evidence that the universe looks the same whichever direction we look in might seem to suggest there is something special about our place in the universe. In particular, it might seem that if we observe all other galaxies to be moving away from us, then we must be at the center of the universe. There is, however, an alternate explanation: the universe might look the same in every direction as seen from any other galaxy too. This, as we have seen, was Friedmann’s second assumption. We have no scientific evidence for, or against, this assumption. We believe it only on grounds of modesty" Stephen William Hawking

"Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreshadowing of an America in the time of my children or grandchildren – when the United States is a service and information economy; when Almost all major manufacturing industries have moved to other countries; when terrible technological powers are in the hands of too few, and no one representing the public interest can understand the issues; when people have lost the ability to set their own agenda. Lost or deliberately questioned by those in power; when, holding our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our vital faculties decline, in distinguishing between what feels good and what is true Unable, we go back to superstition and darkness, almost without noticing. America’s downfall is most evident in the slow decay of real content in the most influential media, 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), credible presentations on lowest common denominator programming, pseudoscience and superstition, but especially From a kind of celebration of ignorance." Dr. Carl Edward Sagan

"They defend the old theories by complicating things to the point of incomprehensibility." Fred Hoyle

"In our dreams we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our moulding hand. The present education conventions made from our minds and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor shall we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply. The task which we set before ourselves is a very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children into a little community and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shop and on the farm." Frederick Taylor Gates

"Science delusion is the belief that science has already fundamentally understood the nature of our reality and only the details need to be completed. I believe this is a seriously flawed view. Most people's first reaction is one of disbelief and rejection when they first hear this statement. How could there actually be anything more successful than science? It has given us cell phones, computers, airplanes, advanced forms of surgery, and much more. We have huge advantages today through science and through its technical applications. It looks as if there is no more room for error or even delusion there, and yet I maintain that at the innermost core of today's sciences there are fundamental errors of thought and dubious assumptions, and that there is a conflict within the sciences that keeps them from their proper task. I see science as a method of inquiry, a tool for exploring and investigating reality. But there is another side to the sciences, namely science as a worldview or even as a dogmatic belief system. Again, most people are shocked at first when I suggest that science can be a dogmatic belief system. They then say things like, "Hey, science in particular is the only thing that is possible for us and to leave our dogmatic belief patterns. It's the only discipline that produces tangible evidence, full respect, free inquiry, and open thinking." Now, this is the ideal of the sciences, and it is an ideal that I also share. But unfortunately, in practice, this ideal is usually not realized in the way it is preached. Within the sciences there is a strongly defined corset of beliefs that most scientists do not even suspect could be beliefs. They do believe that other people have beliefs-Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, and so on-but they themselves, of course, have no beliefs because they are, after all, concerned with scientific truth. And these beliefs are taken as such settled, established truths that they are usually not even discussed. When you study science, people don't just tell you what beliefs to accept and what things to know. You just absorb these principles like the process of osmosis in biology. These are things that are treated with such a matter of course that you just assume they must be true. Most people outside the scientific world assume that they must be true because science is simply so successful and, as a result, enjoys an enormously high level of prestige today." Rupert Sheldrake

"We have to acknowledge that most of us love their hypotheses, and, as I once said, it is a painful exercise, but one that keeps us young and healthy like morning gymnastics, to throw your favorite hypothesis overboard every day." Konrad Lorenz

"I should like to say two things, one intellectual and one moral. The intellectual thing I should want to say is this: When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed. But look only, and solely, at what are the facts. That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say. The moral thing I should wish to say…I should say love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world which is getting more closely and closely interconnected we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way and if we are to live together and not die together we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet." Bertrand Russell

"We know this by patient and long continued investigations - the surface of water is a LEVEL SURFACE. This is the key which is unlocking the minds of the people and letting in a flood of light upon the question of the shape of the earth. We know consequently that the surface of earth is a plane surface and that the earth itself can NOT be a globe." John Hampden

"There are numerous sociological and historical case studies describing how opinions are established as "knowledge" in societies. For example, Paul Feyerabend explained in 1975 that the establishment of the heliocentric worldview was not based on new discoveries, but on a clever propaganda strategy of Galileo Galilei. According to Feyerabend, the representatives of the geocentric world view "did not recognize the propaganda value of predictions and dramatic shows, nor did they make use of the intellectual and social power of the newly created classes. They lost because they did not take advantage of existing opportunities."" Paul Feyerabend

"We can talk with precision of a body as spinning around relative to something or another, but there is no such thing as absolute spin: the Earth is not spinning to those of us who live on its surface and our point of view is as good as anyone else’s – but no better." Sir Fred Hoyle

"Actually neither this Galileo, nor his mentor Copernicus, had a shred of truly tangible and unequivocal evidence for their heliocentric belief – and well do historians, astronomers, and philosophers of science know it! As I recently found it succinctly expressed in a research paper “Since Galileo science has shed logical proofs in favour of plausibility. Indeed, by this “scientific method” of adding plausible explanations to plausible explanations astronomy has arrived at the present view of the cosmos. However, those who forget that “plausible” and “proven” are not synonyms inevitably will see their chickens come home to roost.”" Walter van der Kamp

"There is absolutely no basis at all for thinking the world is flat. Nobody in human history, as far as I know, has thought the world was flat. The Greeks measured the radius of the Earth. I cannot conceive of a reason why anybody would think the world is flat. There are interesting bits of physics that tell you you live on a spinning planet and one of them is called the Coriolis force, which is the force that's responsible for causing storm systems to rotate on the planet. So when you see those beautiful pictures of storms spinning around and rotating, the reason for that is that we live on a spinning planet. It's probably the most nonsensical suggestion that a thinking human being could possibly make. It is drivel." Brian Edward Cox

"Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with." Max Planck