We have traced the philosophy of Earth and the universe from primitive man to Einstein and beyond, and witnessed the step-by step elimination of axioms that seemed oviously true and hence were not even questioned.

Common sense through the millennia knew the earth to be flat, until Pythagoras recognised its shadow on the moon; but his spherical earth was rejected for another century.  Through another sixteen centuries savants still knew that the earth was the stationary hub of the universe until Copernicus subordinated it to a mere satellite of the sun, soon seen to be insignificant among billions of billions of other suns; but his insight was rejected by contemporary astronomers and theologians.  Living species were unique, immutable creations until Darwin substituted an evolutionary process; but evolution is still passionately ridiculed by faithful believers in the literal Bible.  Organic chemicals could only be made via the "vital force" of living organisms until Friedrich Wohler synthesised urea; but it was decades later before the false creed was abandoned.  Man, the living image of God, for whom the whole universe was created is only now being rationalised as the transient apex of an evolutionary process, destined to go on to still inconceivable lineages through the countless eons ahead. Right up to this century the fixity of the relative positions of continents was axiomatic, until Wegener astonished the world by demonstrating that assembly of the continents produced surprising coherence, only to be scorned and ridiculed because physicists insisted on the impossibilitiy of such continental plates sliding on their substratum.  When American oceanographers established beyond any doubt that each of the oceans was spreading at surprisingly rapid rates, the physicists' objections were swept away before the flood of acceptance of plate tectonics, but in hindsight the physicists were correct.  The continents do not move over their underlying mantle.  The truth had been occluded from both geologists and physicists by another false axiom, the gratuitious assumption that the radius of the earth was constant.  Ocean growth expands the earth without moving the continents with respect to the mantle below them.

Have we now cleared away all our spurious axioms?  Of course not.  We must now have the courage to emulate Pythagoras, Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, Darwin, Wegener, and Einstein to emancipate our minds from ever more false axioms inherited inviolate from out primitive past - things we think we know and take for granted, without really asking whether they are valid.

First, orthodoxy has always assumed that the universe was created with its complete inheritance of matter, which thereafter has remained constant.  Likewise, that all the matter in the present solar system was present in the initial gaseous nebula that spawned the sun and its satellites.  Similarly it is taken for granted that all the matter of the earth has been inherited from the time of its initial accretion.  Each of these cognate assumptions is false; matter is created continuously and spontaneously at all levels.

Second, current cosmology clings to the myth that a few billion years ago time and space came into being and the matter of 20 billion stars appeared from nothing in a Big Bang, which has been blowing apart ever since.
 

Fourth, Einstein expressed surprise that inertial mass and gravitational mass should turn out to be precisely equal without any fundamental reason why this should be so.  He also deduced that mass equals energy divided by the square of the velocity of light (the latter being a pure number, following Parkinson's insight).  Mass and energy are thus of the same kind, indeed complementary gemini like the two sides of a coin, born together and cancelling together.  If a new mass is added to the universe, potential energy precisely equal to its inertial mass is also added and vice versa.

Fifth, Newton's and Hubble's laws are complementary, one fitted to the observed behaviour of the solar system, the other to the observed behaviour of galaxies.  When combined into a single equation they govern the dynamics of the universe, and automatically throw up Einstein's cosmic constant and determine the mean size of galaxies.  Each of these five propositions deletes a false dogma we have taken on faith from the beginning, and thus ranks with the spherical earth of Pythagoras, the heliocentricity of Copernicus, the evolutionary principle of Darwin, and the continental dispersion of Wegener.

The fuge of this narrative is the recurrent obstruction of progress by creed, be it religious doctrine, the renaissance straightjacket of Aristotle, or the veto of the contemporary establishment.  The greatest thinkers have been blinkered by their beliefs.  Creed is the narcosis of vision.

The more radical the advance from current orthodoxy, the more certain will it be scorned and rejected.  Prestige is the canker of the great, because it has been the innovators like Werner, Newton, Kelvin, Jeffreys, Bailey Willis, Gaylord Simpson, and Tuzo Wilson who have led lesser lights into withering rejection of new wisdom.

The emergent generation has not arrived too late.  The glory of science, so marvellous to us, will be eclipsed, and eclipsed again at an accelerating rate in the least expected places, and each new success will light up new horizons beyond, ad infinitum. 

But do not expect to be hailed as a hero when you make your great discovery. More likely you will be a ratbag - maybe failed by your examiners.  Your statistics, or your observations, or your literature study, or your something else will be patently deficient.  Do not doubt that in our enlightened age the really important advances are and will be rejected more often than acclaimed.  Nor should we doubt that in our own professional lifetime we too will repudiate with like pontifical finality the most significant insight ever to reach our desk. 

Should we then give credence to every heretic and iconoclast with the naivete or the zeal or persistence to challenge the established order?  Of course not!  Most heresy is doubtless false - yet latent there are the gems of the age. To discriminate unerringly within doctrine and within heresy needs a keener mind than any yet - but this must be our ever- unattainable goal.