Stephen Hawking | Science fiction like Star Trek is not only good fun
"Science fiction like Star Trek is not only good fun but it also serves a serious purpose, that of expanding the human imagination."
Prof. Stephen Hawking
Zitate
Robert Simmon | That ball became the famous Blue Marble
"The hard part was creating a flat map of the Earth’s surface with four months’ of satellite data. Reto Stockli, now at the Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, did much of this work. Then we wrapped the flat map around a ball. My part was integrating the surface, clouds, and oceans to match people’s expectations of how Earth looks from space. That ball became the famous Blue Marble."
Robert Simmon
Johannes Kepler | it is my pleasure to taunt mortal men with the candid acknowledgement
"Now, eighteen months after the first light, three months after the true day, but a very few days after the pure Sun of that most wonderful study began to shine, nothing restrains me; it is my pleasure to yield to the inspired frenzy, it is my pleasure to taunt mortal men with the candid acknowledgement that I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far, far away from the boundaries of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice; if you are enraged with me, I shall bear it. See, I cast the die, and I write the book. Whether it is to be read by the people of the present or of the future makes no difference: let it await its reader for a hundred years, if God Himself has stood ready for six thousand years for one to study Him."
Johannes Kepler
Pete Holmes | Some people think God created the universe
"Some people think God created the universe. Some people think nothing created the universe, which is the funniest guess and the nothing people make fun of the God people. They say, God doesn't exist. I'm like, okay, maybe. But you know what? Definitely doesn't exist. Nothing. That's the defining characteristic of nothing is that it doesn't exist. So what are we talking about? Either you think it's God, something you can't see, touch, taste, photograph, and science can't prove, or you think it's nothing, something you can't see. Touch, taste, photograph, and science can't prove. But I think we can all agree if nothing, if you are nothing, sometimes spontaneously erupts into everything. That's a pretty goddamn magical fucking nothing you guys and ask.
Ask the nothing people, what happens when you die? They'll tell you nothing. You go into nothing. I'm like, you mean you merge back with your creator? That's heaven, bitch."
Pete Holmes
Spyridon Kakos | The evidence provided by Galileo […] do not even pass simple scrutiny
"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
Stephen Hawking | but one has to be careful not to be labelled a crank
"Since we can’t change the way the universe began, the question of whether time travel is possible is one of whether we can subsequently make space–time so warped that one can go back to the past. I think this is an important subject for research, but one has to be careful not to be labelled a crank. If one made a research grant application to work on time travel it would be dismissed immediately. No government agency could afford to be seen to be spending public money on anything as way out as time travel. Instead one has to use technical terms like closed time-like curves, which are code for time travel. Yet it is a very serious question."
Stephen Hawking
Alexander Unzicker | Particle physics is money thrown away
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
Gregory Lessing Garrett | Big Bang Mysticism
"Modern Astrophysics, Quantum Physics, and Astronomy are, in fact, simply repackaged occultism, and they have been passed off as modern science for many decades. This is known as Scientism. The entire Big Bang Myth is simply a Satanic lie which was necessaty in order to transmit other occult lies, such as The Myth of Gravity, Evolution, Heliocentrism, and eventually, give credence and traction to the idea of alien life.
The primary occult ideology at the basis of all this is the idea of Cosmic Pantheism. The Big Bang Myth reinforces the idea that The Cosmos evolved from a pin prick of substance, and expanded out for billions of years, which is identical to the Kabbalistic occult teachings at the core of Pantheism."
Gregory Lessing Garrett
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | It may be boldly asked
"It may be boldly asked where can the man be found, possessing the extraordinary gifts of Newton, who could suffer himself to be deluded by such a hocus-pocus, if he had not in the first instance willfully deceived himself? Only those who know the strength of self-deception, and the extent to which it sometimes trenches on dishonesty, are in a condition to explain the conduct of Newton and of Newton’s school. To support his unnatural theory Newton heaps fiction upon fiction, seeking to dazzle where he cannot convince. In whatever way or manner may have occurred this business, I must still say that I curse this modern theory of Cosmogony, and hope that perchance there may appear, in due time, some young scientist of genius, who will pick up courage enough to upset this universally disseminated delirium of lunatics."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Fred Hoyle | Science today is locked into paradigms
"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."
Fred Hoyle
Fred Hoyle | Today we cannot say that the Copernican theory is ‘right’
"Today we cannot say that the Copernican theory is ‘right’ and the Ptolemaic theory ‘wrong’ in any meaningful physical sense."
Fred Hoyle
Fred Hoyle | we can take either the Earth or the Sun
"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
Albert Einstein | The struggle, so violent in the early days of science
"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
Albert Einstein | I feel uncertain whether I am in general on the right track
"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
Lincoln Barnett | No physical experiment
"No physical experiment ever proved that the earth actually is in motion."
Lincoln Barnett
Bjørn Ekeberg | cosmological physics that is not often remarked
"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
Neil deGrasse Tyson | no longer invoke your senses to judge what makes sense
"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
Alan Hirshfeld | the pendulum of belief had swung irreversibly to the Copernican side
"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
Albert Einstein | The struggle, so violent in the early days of science
“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
Lawrence Krauss | we are truly the center of the universe
“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
Carl Sagan | Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking
"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
Fred Hoyle | They defend the old theories
"They defend the old theories by complicating things to the point of incomprehensibility."
Fred Hoyle
Arthur Eddington | The problem of the source of a star’s energy
"The problem of the source of a star’s energy will be considered, by a process of exhaustion we are driven to conclude that the only possible source of a star’s energy is subatomic yet it must be confessed that the only hypothesis shows little disposition to accommodate itself to the detailed requirements of observation, and a critic might count up a large number of fatal objections."
Arthur Eddington
Nikolaus Kopernikus | So far as hypotheses are concerned
"So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it."
Nikolaus Kopernikus
Wernher von Braun | the last card is the alien card
“And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens and all of it is a lie"
Wernher von Braun,1977 (cité par Carol Rosin)
John George Abizaid | The earth is flat and stationary
"The earth is flat and stationary, while the sun, moon and stars are in constant motion" This is the Enlightenment of the World
John George Abizaid
John Hampden | We know this by patient and long continued investigations
"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
Nikola Tesla | his mind had to free itself from the influence of delusive appearances
"The greatest triumphs of man were those in which his mind had to free itself from the influence of delusive appearances.[...] An unalterable rotational velocity thru all phases of planetary evolution is manifestly impossible. [...] The truth is, the so-called “axial rotation” of the moon is a phenomenon deceptive alike to the eye and mind and devoid of physical meaning. [...] The moon does rotate, not on its own, but about an axis passing thru the center of the earth, the true and only one."
Nikola Tesla
Paul Feyerabend | the establishment of the heliocentric worldview
"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