![]() Galileo was put in house arrest when the imagined reality of a geocentric world flattered the egos of the dominant forces in society. Imagined realities can consume the oxygen in the room. Within the coming year, project scientists will conduct an expedition to retrieve the fragments of the first interstellar meteor near Papua New Guinea. In this spirit, the research team of the Galileo Project at Harvard, which I lead, is engaged in collecting new data - including a continuous video and audio filming of the sky. ![]() Also, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded this year to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger, who demonstrated experimentally the reality of quantum entanglement. Similarly, astronomer Vera Rubin collected new data on galaxies and confirmed Zwicki’s claim of invisible matter 40 years later. In that vein, Russell collected new data for four years after being intrigued by Payne-Gaposchkin ’s thesis, and then published a paper confirming her thesis. The key for advancing our scientific knowledge is to use preliminary intriguing evidence as a motivation for collecting more data, rather than promoting imagined realities that we had never seen before as an argument that collecting new data is a waste of time. When we eventually find the composition of an interstellar meteor or get a high-resolution image of the next `Oumuamua-like object, we will know whether social pressure to stay within the box was because the box was misplaced. Such was the mainstream notion of causality in classical physics, when quantum mechanical entanglement was discovered, and theoretical physicist Albert Einstein resisted it as “ spooky action at a distance.” Such may be the mainstream notion that interstellar objects are natural rocks of a type that we had never seen before, like hydrogen or nitrogen icebergs. Such was the notion that the Universe is made of the same matter as the sun, until astronomer Fritz Zwickyrealized that the dominant constituent is dark matter and his discovery was ridiculed for 40 years by mainstream astronomers. Such was the notion that the sun is made of the same material as the Earth, until astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin realized that it is made mostly of hydrogen, but the pre-eminent American physicist Henry Norris Russell dissuaded her from including this statement in her Ph.D. The most striking examples in science are those where evidence indicated that the prevailing paradigm is an imagined reality. ![]() ![]() Laying the head of wishful thinking under the guillotine of data is stubbornly difficult for most people, irrespective of whether they are engaged in politics, spirituality or the practice of science. ![]() Finding it requires submission to experimental evidence and giving up on wishful thinking. There are more beautiful realities than the true one. Truth and beauty are not necessarily the same. Nature is one version of reality among the many possible ones. Such data often limits the range of possibilities and rules out beautiful ideas that are not realized in nature. The scientific method pioneered by Galileo Galilei calls for an independent arbitrator regarding the procedure by which we figure out the world - namely, experimental data from instruments - independent of humans. ![]()
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