“Back in 1620, Francis Bacon published his Novum Organum (The New Method). In his description of how to investigate nature, he cautioned would-be scientists about four ‘idols of the mind’.”
“Idola tribus (idols of the tribe) – which occur when people try to feed new facts into their preconceived ideas. ‘The human understanding is like a false mirror,’ Bacon wrote, ‘which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolours the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.’”
“Idola specus (idols of the cave): ‘Everyone… has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolours the light of nature,’ writes Bacon. These individual likes and dislikes cloud judgment.”
“Idola fori (idols of the marketplace): in the exchange of ideas, Bacon writes, ‘the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding’.”
“Idola theatri (idols of the theatre): the final idol comes about by blindly following academic dogma and not asking enough real questions about the world. Why theatre? ‘In my judgment,’ writes Bacon, ‘all the received systems are but so many stage plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion.’”
“An alternative to dark matter was offered in 1981, by the physicist Mordehai Milgrom of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He postulated that gravity pulls a little more strongly than Newton’s laws predict at extremely weak levels.”
“A different approach to dark energy, which is thought to power an acceleration of the Universe, is to dismiss the assumption that matter is distributed evenly throughout space. Then the Universe will naturally change the rate at which it expands.”
“The true gold standard for science is constant self-questioning, constant re‑evaluation, and constant open-mindedness in the search for better explanations. Theories are never ‘true’, even if they fit all known facts. They are merely hypotheses that have been shown to be useful. And they could fall at any moment if new observations come to light that do not fit.”
“The sobering fact is that either 96 per cent of the Universe is unknown to us or we are completely wrong about the way we think the Universe works. Either way, cosmology is far from finished: we have a lot to work out.”