The Breakthrough Manifesto

When Einstein proposed his theory of special relativity in 1905, he ended a decades‐long search for luminiferous ether, which was believed to fill all unoccupied space and to serve as the medium through which electromagnetic waves are transmitted. Physicists of the day were laboring under the Newtonian assumption that all waves require a medium to propagate, just as sound waves require air. Although they spent an untold number of hours searching for the mysterious medium, no one ever found it. (Because it didn't exist!) Just think what progress might have been made on other scientific discoveries if that erroneous assumption had been challenged earlier, and the energy of those scientists was directed elsewhere.

Although it's perhaps easy to look back and think the physicists of the 1800s should have known better, they were far from unique in accepting faulty assumptions as truth. Einstein himself accepted the false assumption that the universe is static rather than expanding, and he created the cosmological constant to force his data to fit that assumption (rather than challenging the assumption itself when he discovered his data didn't fit).²² Modern day science continues to discover previously accepted assumptions that are false. And regular people—us non‐scientists—are ...