The Rebel Orbits of the Rebel Planets

When are the stars and planets going to conform to the law passed by human governments?

Or conform to the doctrine of human science?

Funny questions, but governments seem to think that their laws are more important than the actual laws of the cosmos it sometimes seems.

The universe does not change when we pass environmental laws or when we make doctrinal declarations about this or that cosmic reality.

That applies to our sense of cosmology, our hypothetical sense of the cosmos, and our theoretical sense of the cosmos, taught in the state universities.

Yes, the state has an approved dogma for you and I to learn, which they call "education", but some scholars have a different name for it:

And, of course, there are power systems in place to facilitate this. Throughout history it's been mostly the property holders or the educated classes who've tended to support power systems. And that's a large part of what I think education is — it's a form of indoctrination. You have to reconstruct a picture of the world in order to be conducive to the interests and concerns of the educated classes, and this involves a lot of self-deceit.

(Noam Chomsky, emphasis added). Another scholar, a noted physicist, uses similar language to point out his belief that much of "advanced" scientific theory is nothing more than fantasy:

Quantum mechanics is an incredible theory that explains all sorts of things that couldn’t be explained before, starting with the stability of atoms. But when you accept the weirdness of quantum mechanics [in the macro world], you have to give up the idea of space-time as we know it from Einstein. The greatest weirdness here is that it [quantum mechanics] doesn’t make sense. If you follow the rules, you come up with something that just isn’t right.

...

The [new Penrose] book is called Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe. Each of those words stands for a major theoretical physics idea. The fashion is string theory; the fantasy has to do with various cosmological schemes, mainly inflationary cosmology [which suggests that the universe inflated exponentially within a small fraction of a second after the Big Bang]. Big fish, those things are. It’s almost sacrilegious to attack them. And the other one, even more sacrilegious, is quantum mechanics at all levels—so that’s the faith. People somehow got the view that you really can’t question it.

(The Memes of Penrose, see Discover). In general these scholars point out that you are judged by how well you learn their scientific dogma, not on how well you learn how to think or apply rigorous scientific processes.

Thus, after all your hard work to memorize doctrine and dogma, every once in awhile you get blind sided with some new information, new data, or new experimental results that give you reason to throw out the window some of the textbooks you memorized from:

Planets are thought to form in the disc of gas and dust encircling a young star. This proto-planetary disc rotates in the same direction as the star itself, and up to now it was expected that planets that form from the disc would all orbit in more or less the same plane, and that they would move along their orbits in the same direction as the star's rotation.

...

They even found that six exoplanets in this extended study (of which two are new discoveries) have retrograde motion: they orbit their star in the "wrong" direction.

"The new results really challenge the conventional wisdom that planets should always orbit in the same direction as their stars spin," says Andrew Cameron of the University of St Andrews, who presented the new results at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM2010) in Glasgow this week.

(Turning Planetary Theory Upside Down). That is the way it has been for decade upon decade, however, that is not what scientists tend to feel, because they actually have made a faith out of portions of what they call science.