Suppression, Censorship and Dogmatism in Science
Historically, there were few scientific breakthroughs that were not violently opposed, condemned and strongly resisted. Every scientist knows this, Thomas Kuhn has written a book about it that is considered a classic, and yet the pattern keeps repeating itself. Many mainstream scientists these days believe that science has essentially reached 'the end of the road', that everything that can be understood has been understood, and that therefore claims to genuinely revolutionary discoveries must necessarily be erroneous or fraudulent.
Establishment science has thus gotten into the habit of ignoring, burying or suppressing what has now become astonishing amounts of anomalous evidence. Some of this evidence challenges the very foundations of the accepted scientific worldview, and none of it is taught in universities or covered by textbooks. Mention any of it to a mainstream scientist, and odds are you will be dismissed as a crank, or worse, a crackpot. The conclusion is sobering: some of what passes for "scientific fact" these days is little more than a social construct. What is true and what is not is determined by the scientific prestige of the claimant, the predilections of journal editors and referees, and by economic interests. A scientist who challenges the status quo becomes a persona non grata - banned from publication in journals and speaking on conferences, defunded, marginalized. The victims of this phenomenon include world-class scientists such as Jacques Benveniste, Peter Duesberg, Halton Arp, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischman.
"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it - even if I said it - unless your own reason and your own common sense agree." Buddha (563BC-483BC), quoted from Civilization's Quotations: Life's Ideal
"There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors."
J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoted in Life, October 10, 1949.
"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."
Albert Abraham Michelson, speaking at the University of Chicago, 1894
"the great era of scientific discovery is over.... Further research may yield no more great revelations of revolutions, but only incremental, diminishing returns."
Science journalist John Horgan, in The End of Science (1997)
"It is ironical that, in the very field in which Science has claimed superiority to Theology, for example - in the abandoning of dogma and the granting of absolute freedom to criticism - the positions are now reversed. Science will not tolerate criticism of special relativity, while Theology talks freely about the death of God, religionless Christianity, and so on."
Herbert Dingle, Science at the Crossroads, 1972
"All scientific knowledge is provisional. Everything that science "knows," even the most mundane facts and long-established theories, is subject to reexamination as new information comes in."
Scientific American editorial, December 2002.
