Brian Schmidt Quotes
There can be theory but, you know, the problem is you've got to be able to test it. So theories are one thing, testing is another.
Schmidt, Brian P. "Interview with Nobel Laureate Brian Schmidt." The Science Show, interviewed by Robyn Williams, ABC Radio National, 8 Oct. 2011.
A null hypothesis is a statistical scientific term that a researcher assumes and uses to compare other things to. If there are no significant, found differences, the null hypothesis is not rejected. If significant differences are found, then the null hypothesis (yesterday's truth) is then rejected. In science, no one has been right for 400 years since Aristotle. Truth is never eternal. It is continuously subjected to testing and conformation and history has shown that with new instruments, new techniques and new other findings to work from, sooner or later what we think is true today turns out to not quite be so. Often it is not completely wrong, but the old "truth" turns out to be not so in all cases or situations. For example, the mechanics of Isaac Newton was assumed for a few centuries to be true. Then along came Albert Einstein and he showed that Newton was right except when objects were traveling at very high speeds when Relativity explained them. And in less than one century, we realized that Einstein's Relativity explained everything except very small particles which are better explained by Quantum Mechanics. This process of will almost certainly continue.
This quotation is used by some of those demonstrating that “Creation Science” is not science, as it is a set of facts, with no experimental verification.
This quotation illustrates and important aspect of science. Specifically, that theory, something ephemeral and impractical to the layman, has immense practical power in developing great scientific and technological breakthroughs. The result of this breakthrough was large lenses that could make lights more powerful and make lighthouses much more safe. Even the atomic bomb was really developed from theory and then engineered for practical use.
Brian Paul Schmidt AC, FRS, FAA is the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University (ANU). He was previously a Distinguished Professor, Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and astrophysicist at the University's Mount Stromlo Observatory and Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. He currently holds an Australia Research Council Federation Fellowship and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2012. Schmidt shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, making him the only Montana-born Nobel laureate.
