Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
- Immanuel Kant
Today, I attended Professor Zhang Shuangnan's astronomy class at Gaoshan Academy.
Astronomy is a personal knowledge blind spot for me, so I won't be sharing the informational content, and the course materials and notes are not to be disseminated. I'll just summarize today's gains from the perspective of scientific spirit and attitude.
First and foremost, one must live a long life.
The 2019 Nobel Prize was awarded to Jim Peebles for his theoretical contributions to physical cosmology, including the prediction of cosmic microwave radiation as a remnant of the Big Bang.
But why was it awarded to him? Many people had predicted the cosmic microwave background radiation back then, and the committee found it difficult to determine who was more important, so they had not given the Nobel Prize to experts in this field for a long time. In 2019, Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor were awarded for their first discovery of an exoplanet, and their theoretical foundation was the cosmic microwave background radiation. At this point, among the scholars doing related research in this direction of cosmology, only Grandpa Jim Peebles was still alive. So, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize with the other two.
Therefore, living long enough allows you to see the day when all theories are proven. Outlasting your competitors means the whole world is yours.
Two crosstalk performers trading insults, the one who lives longer is the artist.
- Guo Degang
Secondly, one must persevere.
Scientists once made four "first" discoveries of exoplanets, from 1988 to 1995, with four different teams using various observational methods to detect planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. Each time, they faced skepticism and chose to retract their papers or had insufficient evidence that was not recognized. These teams lacked the courage to stand by their scientific discoveries and thus missed the opportunity to be the "first" to discover a planet.
Sometimes, the lack of persistence is due to uncertainty and insufficient ability. Therefore, cultivate one's inner strength, enhance the ability to make judgments, and increase the courage and determination to persevere.
There is never such a thing as passing by each other.
- Weinberg
Finally, confirmation and falsification.
Modern science has evolved from a science of confirmation to one of falsification; scientific theories can never be proven correct, but they can be falsified, meaning they should and must be subject to experimental testing. If a scientific theory contradicts experimental results, one should avoid making "unnatural" modifications that make it harder to falsify.
For example, Plato believed that the most perfect shape in the universe was a sphere and uniform circular motion, so the universe was harmonious and beautiful; by the time of Ptolemy, through observation, when the observational data did not match, he added epicycles to accommodate the data, which was an unnatural modification; Copernicus thought the epicycle was unnatural, so he proposed the heliocentric theory, and Kepler, finding the data did not match, proposed the elliptical motion of planets. None of them accepted the previous aesthetic view and made natural modifications.
Therefore, only falsification can truly improve a theory: finding the applicable boundaries of the original theory or developing a new one.
“In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.”
- Karl R. Popper
(Zhang Shuangnan, 2021).