Some basic ideas about physics and astronomy remain so mysterious, and their explanations so flexible, they may lead some to question whether they should be called "hard sciences."
The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence is like a detective story without a body. All those new planets, but no signal—at least not one that most scientists will accept.
Here are examples of recent claims in science that seem to contradict what some would consider intuitively obvious. They should be kept in mind when evaluating other scientific truisms, like evolution.
A record-breaking structure in the universe "defies theory," the news said, ignoring that theory has been defied for decades since smaller large structures were found (the lumpiness problem).
Globular clusters supposedly all formed at the same time long ago, but some look young. How do astronomers rescue the belief that they are ancient groupings of stars?
Fifteen years after cosmologists proposed the existence of dark energy, they have learned nothing about it. In “Cosmology: Out of the Darkness,” Matthew Chalmers discussed the current thinking of Brian Schmidt, who shared the Nobel prize in 2011 for discovering cosmic acceleration (actually, an inference based on light from supernovae; see 9/30/2012). “Fifteen years after […]