On Nov 5, 3:27*pm, Pentcho Valev wrote:
Will Hilton Ratcliffe and Jean-Marc Bonnet-Bidaud ever become Fellows
of the Royal Society?

http://www.cambridgechron.com/entert.../Q-A-with-astr...
Hilton Ratcliffe: "Courage? Not much. I am financially independent, so
the pedagogues who rule the practice of physics and, especially,
cosmology do not threaten my personal comfort. I have colleagues who
have been barred from observatories, had been refused publication, had
research funding withdrawn, lost jobs and even been chased from their
country of birth **–– all because they insisted on publicly announcing
what they had seen in the heavens, which did not fit the preferred
model. They have so much courage it makes my eyes water. They almost
literally put their lives on the line. They are the Galileos of our
time. (...) Physics is dying, being suffocated by meta-mathematics,
and physics departments at major universities with grand histories in
physical science are closing down for lack of interest. (...) When
Einstein was ready to write down what was to become his General Theory
of Relativity, he found that the mathematics required by such a
concept were quite beyond him. He consequently engaged the services of
his friend, mathematics professor Marcel Grossman, to construct the
mathematical formalism. Grossman felt, for reasons we can only
speculate, that the best way to achieve this was to use a new and
arcane mathematical language called Differential Geometry. It is
estimated that when GTR was published in 1915, only about a dozen
specialist meta-mathematicians in the world could decipher the math.
Yet, before long, Einstein was the focus of intense international
adulation by millions of people. Since only a minute fraction of those
fans could understand the theory, there had to be another reason for
the adulation. It was not the workings or the plausibility of the
theory that impressed people so much that they created from it an
enduring dogma. It was a psychosocial imperative that characterized
all widely defended dogma, including Big Bang Theory, of course, which
is the offspring of GTR. Once the new dogma has become entrenched
within the educational system, it is done and dusted. Universities
(mostly inadvertently) become in effect propaganda machines and
produce scientists who quite frankly cannot practice or teach physics
any other way. If, as in the case of GTR and later with Big Bang
Theory and Black Hole theory, the protagonists have seductive charisma
(which Einstein, Gamow, and Hawking, respectively, had in abundance)
then the theory, though not the least bit understood, becomes the
darling of the media. GTR and Big Bang Theory are sacrosanct, and it's
most certainly not because they make any sense. In fact, they have
become the measure by which we sanctify nonsense. (...)

I don't think the current "nonsense" in fundamental physics, even
if sanctified by the ruling paradigm, can last for long. However, the
imminent paradigm shift is not likely to be painless process.

G S Sandhu
http://book.fundamentalphysics.info/