[RascalPuff]

"Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things can easily attain an authority over us such that we forget their wordly origin and take them as immutably given.

They are then rather rubber-stamped as a "sine-qua-non of thinking" and an "a priori given", etc.

Such errors make the road of scientific progress often impassable for long times.

Therefore, it is not at all idle play when we are trained to analyze the entrenched concepts, and point out the circumstances that promoted their justification and usefulness and how they evolved from the experience at hand.

This breaks their all too powerful authority.

They are removed when they cannot properly legitimize themselves; they are corrected when their association with given things was too sloppy; they are replaced by others when a new system can be established that, for various reasons, we prefer."

- Einstein, "Ernst Mach", Physikalishe Zeitschrift 17 (1916), 102; Collected Papers vol. 6, Doc. 29

(P.S. Don't tell anybody about the Big Bang Gangologist's adoption of the formerly orphaned & ostrasized Cosmological Constant & Steady theories, in order to 'maintain' the desperately stricken, anemically perished 'big bang beginning', ok? Maybe no one will be watching them, while they deign to do it in the road... <'What big bang makeover?'> Oh yes. They've gone through the line w'out paying for the abducted CC ( /\ Lambda) and Steady State; so far, it - 'the normal adjustment' - continues to be no big shakes...)

Best regards,
- RP

http://forums.delphiforums.com/EinsteinGroupie