All righty let's look at what they taught in schools, shall we?
The fifty-five crystal spheres. This is going back a ways, but the stars have been around for a lot longer and people have been looking at them for about as long as people have cared to. At around the time of Plato, who was born around 429B... er, C, OK? The Common Era? Bloody hell, it's Christ, all right? Christ. Good. Anyway, Plato had a school and one of his bright sparks was a chap named Eudoxus. Eudoxus placed all the fixed stars on a huge sphere, the earth itself a much smaller sphere fixed at the centre. The huge sphere rotated about the earth once every twenty-four hours. So far, this is the standard “starry vault” picture. Then Eudoxus assumed the sun to be attached to another sphere, concentric with the fixed stars’ sphere, that is, it was also centred on the earth. This new sphere, lying entirely inside the sphere carrying the fixed stars, had to be transparent, since the fixed stars are very visible. The new sphere was attached to the fixed stars’ sphere so that it, too, went around every twenty-four hours, but in addition it rotated slowly about the two axis points where it was attached to the big sphere, and this extra rotation was once a year. This meant that the sun, viewed against the backdrop of the fixed stars, traced out a big circular path which it covered in a year.
It wasn't a bad start, but the model didn't quite match what observers were actually seeing, so a few more spheres with a few more circular motions had to be introduced, until they wound up with fifty-five of them altogether. And that was the cosmos. Quite beautiful, and quite poetic really, though poetry isn't exactly scientific. It's a bit too spiritual for one thing, and that's just not rational and can't be proved in an empirical way. Aristotle, reckoned to be the bee's knees amongst thinkers, swore by the fifty-five, and good on him say I. If you have a loony notion, stick to it.
This held sway for a goodly while, some 900-odd years. During which time it became so fixed in people's heads that it was completely outrageous that anyone should thing different. The come the early heroes of the Age of Reason: Copernicus,Tycho Brahe, Keppler, Galileo, et al. Ask your average atheist who was responsible for the suppression and the obligato response is the Church. The church had an awful lot of power in them days.
Supposing you had ideas that didn't meet with the Pope's idea of a good thing. You could be excommunicated. Put outside the circle of those who commune with God through the Church. Heavy shit, because you couldn't do business - business transactions had to be sworn, usually on a Bible. You couldn't baptise any children - necessary if you wanted those children to be taught in school, in the hands of the Church; or to inherit anything of yours - administered by Guess Who, and incidentally bastards couldn't inherit anyway, or be employed by anyone. Hey! Who said anything about bastardy? Well excommunication took care of that, too, because marriage vows don't count when a couple get the cold shoulder from the Church... so all in all, excommunication is a Big Thing. A bit like membership of the Communist Party in socialist states, or carrying a Union card in places where they don't let you work unless you have one, or try and conduct your business outside the reach of the State generally, but I digress.
You see, science doesn't have any difficulty with peer reviews. Who pays the piper calls the tune and lest we forget, there were an awful lot of industry funded studies that told us we couldn't get cancer from cigarettes; that leaded petrol was perfectly safe; that Agent Orange had nothing to do with infertility or deformity amongst veterans' children; that nuclear power was so safe and cheap you would be hard pressed to even charge for it. And fights and scandals? Yes, even High-Minded Science has one or two of them in the back pocket. Alfred Nobel, he of the dynamite fame, discovered his wife was having an affair with a mathematician. That's why the maths johnnies had to come up with their own prize.
The man who helped Captain Cook navigate so successfully, a watchmaker named John Harrison, came up with an ingenious chronometer capable of keeping accurate time at sea. This enabled mariners to know where they were in relation to their port of origin - a useful thing to know if you didn't want to wreck yourself on unexpected rocks. With a prize offered by the British Parliament of £20 000 Harrison wanted a successful trial to claim it, and Cook's log was full of praise for Harrison's wonderful Watch. All good so far, except there was a competing method for reckoning longitude involving observation of the stars and the moon and calculation of those observations against almanac tables. If it sounds a touch on the complicated, it is, and rather weather dependent too - bad luck if a typhoon happened to be blowing. You think a reliable chronometer would have it all over the moon and stars, but for the slight wrinkle that the Astronomer Royal favoured the lunar-star method and he also sat on the Board of Longitude. Nevil Maskelyne kept poor Mr Harrison on a string until the poor bugger was nearly dead before George III took up his case and ensured he got his just desserts.
This is not an isolated case. Scores of tales of back-biting, feuding, slander, sabotage and murder abound in the history of science. Far from extending the glad hand of acknowledgement one is more likely to encounter brutal suppression in the scientific lark. That is unless your backers happen to have enough money or political clout to arrange that you present the right result. Whole industries of chemicals, power generation, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, space exploration and extermination of both human and animal populations are based on this neat little premise. God save us. Science probably has a vested interest in us not being saved. Empirically this is more likely than not.
Which brings me to my other bug-bear. Atheists are fond of saying there is no empirical evidence for God's existence and that the burden of proof lies on the faithful to prove His presence. Bollocks say I. I don't have to prove anything to anyone. What's the point? What possible measurement would satisfy them? How much compassion can you fit into a petrie dish? What is the correct formula for Byron's She Walks in Beauty? What colour is love?
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