“For example, if I suspect that there might still be beer in the fridge and I check, then in principle I’m already doing a preliminary form of science. Big difference to theology. In theology, assumptions are not usually tested. So if I just say “there’s beer in the fridge”, I’m a theologian. If I look, I’m a scientist. If I look, find nothing and still claim there’s beer in it – then I’m an esoteric!”
Vince Ebert
“For centuries the case of Galileo Galilei has been the cornerstone of every major argument against the church and its supposedly unscientific dogmatism. The church seems to have condemned Galileo for his heresies, just because it couldn’t and wouldn’t handle the truth. Galileo was a hero of science wrongfully accused and now – at last – everyone knows that. But is that true? This paper tries to examine the case from the point of modern physics and the conclusions drawn are startling. It seems that contemporary church was too haste into condemning itself. The evidence provided by Galileo to support the heliocentric system do not even pass simple scrutiny, while modern physics has ruled for a long time now against both heliocentric and geocentric models as depictions of the “truth”. As Einstein eloquently said, the debate about which system is chosen is void of any meaning from a physics’ point of view. At the end, the selection of the center is more a matter of choice rather than a matter of ‘truth’ of any kind. And this choice is driven by specific philosophical axioms penetrating astronomy for hundreds of years now. From Galileo to Hubble, the Copernican principle has been slowly transformed to a dogma followed by all mainstream astronomers. It is time to challenge our dogmatic adherence to the anti-humanism idea that we are insignificant in the cosmos and start making true honest science again, as Copernicus once postulated.”
Spyridon Kakos
The sensational news that a fundamental particle has been discovered is somewhere between a misuse of language and a lie. What was found did not solve a single problem in physics, and yet was immediately celebrated as the discovery of the century. Whether this was deliberate misdirection, shameless puffery or foolish parroting remains to be seen. […] The idea of tens of thousands of physicists conducting an unmanageable experiment on a nonsensical theoretical model, seems to prohibit itself. It is too painful to even consider. But this is soberly true. Particle physics is money thrown away.”
Alexander Unzicker
“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
“It’s perhaps worth stopping to ask why astrophysicists hypothesize dark matter to be everywhere in the universe. The answer lies in a peculiar feature of cosmological physics that is not often remarked. A crucial function of theories such as dark matter, dark energy and inflation—each in its own way tied to the big bang paradigm—is not to describe known empirical phenomena but rather to maintain the mathematical coherence of the framework itself while accounting for discrepant observations. Fundamentally, they are names for something that must exist insofar as the framework is assumed to be universally valid.”
Bjørn Ekeberg
“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
“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 alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers in the preceding generation (…) When someone says, “Science teaches such and such,” he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, “Science has shown such and such,” you might ask, “How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?” It should not be “science has shown” but “this experiment, this effect, has shown.” And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments–but be patient and listen to all the evidence–to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at. (…) The experts who are leading you may be wrong. (…) I think we live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television-words, books, and so on-are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.”
Richard Phillips Feynman