'Nicholas of Cusa, 1401'<blockquote>'In his major work, paradoxically entitled On Learned Ignorance, Nicholas, returned to the central idea of Anaxagoras- an infinite, unlimited universe. In contrast to Ptolemy's finite cosmos circumscribed by concentric spheres with earth at their center, Nicholas argued that the universe has no limits in space, no beginning or ending in time. God is not located outside the finite universe, he is everywhere and nowhere, transcending space and time.
Nicholas's infinite universe is populated by an unlimited number of stars and planets, and, of course, has no center, no single immobile place of rest. The earth, he reasoned, must therefore move, like everything else in the universe. It appears at rest only because we're on it, moving with it. He cast aside the geocentric cosmos entirely.'
- Eric J. Lerner [1]</blockquote>
'The older generation of scientists had picked their research topics according to their own interests and often hopped across an entire field (as the best twentieth-century scientists continue to do)...'<blockquote>'
Science, Specialization and AcademiaIn 1889 Samuel Pierpont Langley, a famed astronomer, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and soon to be the one of the pioneers of aviation, described the scientific community as
"a pack of hounds ... where the louder-voiced bring many to follow them nearly as often in a wrong path as in a right one, where the entire pack even has been known to move off bodily on a false scent."The current system of specialized peer review originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as science became more closely tied to, and supported by, large-scale capitalist enterprise. While inventor-entrepreneurs like Thomas Edison chose for themselves what to research, the later financier-industrialists wanted the "quality of work" guaranteed in advance. So they, together with leading academics, encouraged the idea of peer review- the inspection of scientific work by the "best authorities" in a given field.
At the same time, the growing industrialization of scientific research led to an increasing level of specialization. The older generation of scientists had picked their research topics according to their own interests and often hopped across an entire field (as the best twentieth-century scientists continue to do). But as scientific research became organized in large-scale industrial labs, and as university work fell under the sway of industrial concerns, research came to focus on specific topics of commercial need, and scientists were encouraged to devote their entire career to single specialties.
The combination of growing specialization and the peer-review system have fractured science into isolated domains, each with a built-in tendency toward theoretical orthodoxy and a hostility to other disciplines.
Evidence that "interdisciplinarification" does, in fact, fight orthodoxy and encourage the development of new ideas is in the willingness of Nobel Prize committees to recognize mavericks like Alfven and Prigogine. The committees consist of representatives from the whole broad field, such as physics or chemistry, and so they do not respect the specific orthodoxies of a given specialty and are far better able to judge a scientist's work on its merit, no matter how controversial it may be.
When scientists are specialized," Alfven comments, "it's easy for orthodoxy to develop. The same individuals who formulate orthodox theory enforce it by reviewing papers submitted to journals, and grant proposals as well. From this standpoint, I think the Catholic Church was too much blamed in the case of Galileo- he was just a victim of peer review.
The ability of a scientific theory to be refuted is the key criterion that distinguishes science. If a theory cannot be refuted, if there is no observation that will disprove it, then nothing can prove it - it cannot predict anything, it is a worthless myth.'
- Eric J. Lerner [1]</blockquote>
Note[1]
http://www.spaceandmotion.com/cosmology/lerner-big-bang-never-happened.htm