Against the Tide

Abstract

Nobody should have a monopoly of the truth in this universe. The censorship and suppression of challenging ideas against the tide of mainstream research, the blacklisting of scientists, for instance, is neither the best way to do and filter science, nor to promote progress in the human knowledge. The removal of good and novel ideas from the scientific stage is very detrimental to the pursuit of the truth. There are instances in which a mere unqualified belief can occasionally be converted into a generally accepted scientific theory through the screening action of refereed literature and meetings planned by the scientific organizing committees and through the distribution of funds controlled by "club opinions". It leads to unitary paradigms and unitary thinking not necessarily associated to the unique truth. This is the topic of this book: to critically analyze the problems of the official (and sometimes illicit) mechanisms under which current science (physics and astronomy in particular) is being administered and filtered today, along with the onerous consequences these mechanisms have on all of us.

Apart from the editors, Juan Miguel Campanario, Brian Martin, Wolfgang Kundt, J. Marvin Herndon, Marian Apostol, Halton C. Arp, Tom Van Flandern, Andrei P. Kirilyuk, Dmitri Rabounski and Henry H. Bauer, all of them professional researchers, reveal a pessimistic view of the miseries of the actual system, while a glimmer of hope remains in the "leitmotiv" claim towards the freedom in doing research and attaining an acceptable level of ethics in science.

About the Author

Editors:

Martín López Corredoira is a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (Tenerife, Spain). He holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of La Laguna at Tenerife and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Seville (Spain). He has authored articles in peer reviewed journals of astrophysics, and two books on philosophy in Spanish: Diálogos entre Razón y Sentimiento and Somos Fragmentos de Naturaleza Arrastrados por Sus Leyes.

Carlos Castro Perelman is a researcher affiliated with the Center for Theoretical Studies of Physical Systems at Clark Atlanta University (USA). He has a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of over 115 articles on such topics as: the extended relativity theory in Clifford spaces, gravity, supersymmetry, strings, p-branes, fractals, quantum field theory, mathematical physics, number theory.