Science

"Gentlemen, as a physicist who has dedicated his entire life to the sober pursuit of science, to the exploration of matter, I am certainly free from the suspicion of being taken for an idle dreamer. And so, after my investigations into the atom, I declare this: There is no such thing as matter in itself. All matter comes into being and persists only through a force—a force that sets the particles of the atom into vibration and binds them together as the minutest solar system of the cosmos. Yet, since neither an intelligent nor an eternal force exists within the vast expanse of the universe—for humanity has failed to devise the long-sought perpetuum mobile—we must posit behind this force a conscious, intelligent spirit. This spirit is the primal source of all matter. It is not the visible, transient matter that constitutes the real, the true, the actual—for without the spirit, matter would not exist at all—but rather the invisible, immortal spirit that is the ultimate truth! Yet, since spirit alone cannot exist either, and every spirit belongs to a being, we are compelled to assume the existence of spiritual beings. And since these beings cannot arise from themselves but must be created, I do not shy away from naming this mysterious creator as all civilized peoples of the earth have called Him in earlier millennia: God! Thus, the physicist, tasked with the study of matter, steps from the realm of the material into the realm of the spirit. And with that, our work concludes, and we must entrust our inquiry to the hands of philosophy." Max Planck

"Science today is locked into paradigms. Every avenue is blocked by beliefs that are wrong, and if you try to get anything published by a journal today, you will run against a paradigm and the editors will turn it down." Sir Fred Hoyle

"Today we cannot say that the Copernican theory is ‘right’ and the Ptolemaic theory ‘wrong’ in any meaningful physical sense." Sir Fred Hoyle

"we can take either the Earth or the Sun, or any other point for that matter, as the center of the solar system." Fred Hoyle

"You imagine that I look back on my life’s work with calm satisfaction. But from nearby it looks quite different. There is not a single concept of which I am convinced that it will stand firm, and I feel uncertain whether I am in general on the right track." Albert Einstein

"No physical experiment ever proved that the earth actually is in motion." Lincoln Barnett

"So, what you learn when you study science in general, but astrophysics especially, is that you no longer invoke your senses to judge what makes sense, or you no longer invoke your personal philosophies to judge what should be true. The universe is what it is, and it really doesn't care about your senses." Neil deGrasse Tyson

"We leave you much that is undone. There are great ideas undiscovered, breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truth's protective layers. There are places to go beyond belief. Those challenges are yours -- in many fields, not the least of which is space, because there lies human destiny" Neil Alden Armstrong

"In Newton’s day, the Ptolemaic system and the Keplerian version of the Copernican system were taught side by side in the universities of the world. But the pendulum of belief had swung irreversibly to the Copernican side. In the minds of most scientists, the heliocentric universe had become fact…Yet there remained a crucial missing element in what was otherwise a complete and compelling picture of the universe: Not one shred of indisputable observational proof existed that the Earth moved through space.Here then was the holy grail of many an astronomer. To prove that the Earth in fact revolved in a wide orbit around the Sun, the parallax of just one star – any star – had to be detected. The hunt for stellar parallax was on." Alan Hirshfeld

"The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either CS [coordinate system] could be used with equal justification. The two sentences, “the Sun is at rest and the Earth moves,” or “the Sun moves and the Earth is at rest,” would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS." Albert Einstein

"“But when you look at CMB map (Cosmic Microwave Background), you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun - the plane of the earth around the sun - the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe. The new results are either telling us that all of science is wrong and we're the center of the universe, or maybe the data is (s)imply incorrect, or maybe it's telling us there's something weird about the microwave background results and that maybe, maybe there's something wrong with our theories on the larger scales.”" Lawrence Krauss

"It is commonly believed that man will fly directly from the earth to the moon, but to do this, we would require a vehicle of such gigantic proportions that it would prove an economic impossibility. It would have to develop sufficient speed to penetrate the atmosphere and overcome the earth’s gravity and, having traveled all the way to the moon, it must still have enough fuel to land safely and make the return trip to earth. Furthermore, in order to give the expedition a margin of safety, we would not use one ship alone, but a minimum of three … each rocket ship would be taller than New York’s Empire State Building [almost ¼ mile high] and weigh about ten times the tonnage of the Queen Mary, or some 800,000 tons." Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun

"The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists. In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis. There is, however, a very real problem with providing a decent standard of living to the world’s large population and an associated energy crisis. The latter is being unnecessarily exacerbated by what, in my opinion, is incorrect climate science." John Francis Clauser

"My work is about the effect of the sun on climate, and if the sun has a decisive influence on climate, that means that the influence of CO2 is smaller. That doesn't fit with the narrative that CO2 is supposed to be such a dominant factor in global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a UN organization that admits members based on area, political affiliation, and in some cases merit. My work is in fact ignored by it. In the Climategate emails, that went public in 2011, I noticed an email discussing possible authors for the IPCC's fifth assessment report. One qualification for an author had to be that he was 'anti-Svensmark'." Henrik Svensmark