THE REINVENTION OF SCIENCE: SLAYING THE DRAGONS OF DOGMA AND IGNORANCE

Throughout the history of science, different thinkers, philosophers and scientists postulated the existence of entities that, in spite of their not being visible or detectable in their time, or perhaps ever, were nevertheless useful to explain the real world. We started this book by looking at a handful of these entities. These included phlogiston to account for fire; the luminiferous ether for propagation of radiation; the homunculus to provide for heredity; and crystalline spheres to carry the wandering planets around the earth. Many of these erroneous beliefs had held up progress, just as dragons drawn on the edges of a map discouraged exploration. This pattern of science evolution continued through the centuries up to the present day. The book evolved into a more extensive history of how science evolved through controversy, suppression, and the desire to maintain the status quo. Our story passes from the Babylonians and Greeks through the middle ages, the renaissance and the scientific revolution to almost current events. We discuss the evolution of our world, the controversy about the extinction of dinosaurs, and open questions in contemporary science such as dark matter, black holes and the origin of the Universe, including how we understand the subatomic world of elementary particles. Most of the chapters deal with astronomy, cosmology and physics, but there are brief ventures into geosciences (continental drift), biosciences (the homunculus), atmospheric physics (Heaviside layer), paleontology (the extinction of dinosaurs), and computer science (artificial intelligence). The authors present a sequence of how mistakes and fallacies have been purged from our quest to understand nature. The way these changes have come about are skillfully set in their relevant historical contexts.

Bernard J T Jones is Emeritus Professor at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute of the University of Groningen. His research has covered many areas of astrophysics, both theoretical and observational, with a strong emphasis on cosmology, where he is widely published and cited. He is the author of the recently highly celebrated book Precision Cosmology: The First Half Million Years published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press. He has also developed sophisticated computer imaging systems for diverse mission-critical industrial and surveillance markets.

Vicent J Martínez is Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of València, where he was the director of its Astronomical Observatory for eleven years. His research is focused on the large-scale structure of the universe. He is the author with Enn Saar of the book Statistics of the Galaxy Distribution published by CRC Press in 2002. He received the Savirón Award on Popular Science 2013, and the Award for Teaching and Disseminating Physics from the Royal Spanish Society of Physics and the BBVA Foundation.

Virginia L Trimble is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. She has been working on the structure and evolution of stars, galaxies, and the universe, and of the communities of scientists who study them, and history of science, especially astronomy and physics. She received the 2019 Andrew Gemant Award of the American Institute of Physics and was elected as a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society (2020) and a Fellow of the Scientific Research Honor Society Sigma Xi (2021). She was President of the Division of Galaxies and the Universe and the Division of Union-wide activities of the International Astronomical Union. She is Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of València (2010). Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected in 2023). She has recived the American  Physical  Society's Abraham Pais Prize in History of Physics 2024.