I haven't taken this position just to be difficult. To look around, the world does appear to be flat, so I think it is incumbent on others to prove decisively that it isn't. And I don't think that burden of proof has been met yet.
-- Daniel Shenton, President of the Flat Earth Society as of 2010
In a similar spirit:
...Excellent! Three cheers for Shenton!
As long as people are prepared to take on unpalatable ideas, and really push to see if they have merit, then we might just make significant NEW discoveries, instead of the slow and detailed clarification of what we already know.
It really doesn't matter if the Earth proves not to be flat. :-) There are other, equally crazy, ideas out there, and a few of them are true! THEY are the ones we want to find, if we can.
As Richard Feynman (the pre-eminent scientist of the modern era, in my opinion) said: &qu
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.