Abstract

This article examines a structural shift in the conduct of science, using cosmology as a case study. It argues that the discipline has moved from a mode of inquiry driven by perception and conceptual insight — what may be called high perceptual potential (what may be called high perceptual potential (HPE, from the French "haut potentiel émotionnel" ) — to one dominated by formal and mathematical production (high intellectual potential, from French HPI; see Terman, 1925) . The first mode gave rise to the major conceptual ruptures of the scientific tradition, from Copernicus to Einstein. The second mode, which became dominant in the twentieth century, produces refinement and extension, but rarely new foundations.

The consequences of this shift are examined through the case of ΛCDM, the current model of cosmology. It accumulates a long list of unresolved incongruities that have apparently become part of the landscape accepted by all (Bull et al., 2016).

The article then examines the mechanisms that sustain this situation. It documents the barriers that prevent independent and heterodox contributions from entering the field: gatekeeping at the level of preprint endorsement (Ginsparg, 2011), editorial selection before peer review (Ross-Hellauer, 2017), institutional bias in evaluation (Tomkins et al., 2017), and the absence of any alternative channel. It shows that the exclusion is not the result of an explicit policy, but of an architecture — a system of cooptation that requires prior membership in order to enter.

Finally, the article considers what is lost when a discipline privileges one mode of thought over another. It argues that the exclusion of perceptual and conceptual approaches produces blind spots that accumulate without being seen, and that the current state of cosmology is an illustration of this process.

Introduction

Cosmology today is a discipline in difficulty. Not because its observations are lacking — the opposite is true. The instruments have never been more powerful, the data more abundant, the collaborations more international. But because the model that organizes this abundance, ΛCDM, has accumulated a series of unresolved incongruities that no longer seem to trouble anyone (Bull et al., 2016; Planck Collaboration, 2020): 

• A singularity and its Big Bang are posited outside a universe declared to be all that exists.

• A cosmic time is used to date events, although the universe contains no chronometer.

• The celebrated mass of Newton has never been defined (Newton, 1687; Mach, 1883).

• And when Einstein tried to define it, he changed the nature of its value (Einstein, 1905, 1948).

• Dark matter and dark energy are patches, which, together, account for roughly ninety-five percent of the universe's content, but they have never been detected (Bertone & Hooper, 2018; Weinberg, 1989).

• The Higgs boson is another useless patch: particles have no more mass than ordinary objects do. In both cases, what we call mass is an effect, not an intrinsic property (Higgs, 1964).

• For a century, gravity has refused to be included in quantum mechanics. Physicists still persist in pushing it in (Penrose, 1965).

This is only a partial picture of cosmology's reality. Here is how the disaster happened.

From Copernicus to Einstein

The scientific tradition that produced the major conceptual ruptures was not, in its origins, a tradition of calculation. It was a tradition of perception. Its practitioners observed, intuited, and proposed new frameworks — often before they could formalize them, and most of the times without the mathematical tools to do so at all. Their strength was not precision. It was the ability to see what did not fit.

This chapter traces that tradition, from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, and shows how each of its major ruptures was driven by a mode of inquiry that today would be called HPE.

Copernicus

Nicolaus Copernicus was not a great mathematician. He was a canon, an administrator, and an astronomer by avocation. What he saw was not a new calculation, but an incoherence. The Ptolemaic system had become unmanageable: epicycles upon epicycles, deferents, equants, corrections added to corrections to keep the appearances consistent with a geocentric cosmos. Copernicus proposed to place the Sun at the centre — not because he could prove it, but because it produced a simpler and more coherent reading of the same observations (Copernicus, 1543). 

His book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, was published in 1543, the year of his death. The mathematical apparatus it contained was not new, and not entirely correct. But the shift of perspective it introduced was decisive. It did not calculate a new universe. It read the same universe differently.

Kepler

Johannes Kepler is often presented as the mathematician who completed Copernicus. But his work began with a perception that was almost mystical: that the planets must follow harmonious paths, that the geometry of the cosmos must reflect a divine order. He spent years trying to fit the planetary orbits into nested Platonic solids — an effort that failed, but that led him, by persistence, to discover the elliptical orbits (Kepler, 1609).

His three laws are mathematical. But they were not found by mathematics. They were found by a man who refused to accept circular orbits because circles did not fit what he perceived in the data.

Galileo

Galileo Galilei is remembered as the first modern scientist — the one who turned the telescope to the sky and observed what no one had seen. He saw the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, the mountains on the Moon (Galilei, 1610). What he did with these observations was not calculation. It was argument: that the Earth was not the centre of everything, and that the heavens were not perfect.

His conflict with the Church is often presented as a conflict between science and religion. It was also a conflict between two modes: the mode that observes and reports, and the mode that holds to the established framework.

Newton

Isaac Newton is the hinge. He is the one who formalized — who gave the mathematical apparatus that would dominate physics for two centuries. But Newton himself was not only a mathematician. He spent more time on alchemy and theology than on physics. His intuition of a universal gravitation acting at a distance was, in his own time, considered almost occult. He did not derive it from equations. He saw that the same force that makes an apple fall might hold the Moon in its orbit (Newton, 1687) .

Newton marks the beginning of the formal mode. But he belongs to both. His Principia is a mathematical monument. His mind was that of a man who perceived before he calculated.

Faraday

Michael Faraday is the clearest case. He had almost no mathematical training. He was a bookbinder's apprentice who became one of the greatest experimentalists in history. He discovered electromagnetic induction, formulated the concept of the field, and produced the lines of force that would later be formalized by Maxwell (Faraday, 1839–1855) .

Faraday could not write the equations of his own discoveries. He described them in words and in images. And yet his concepts were so accurate, so well perceived, that Maxwell built on them the mathematical edifice of electromagnetism.

Faraday is the proof that the perceptual mode is not a lesser mode. It is a different mode, capable of producing concepts that mathematics then formalizes. And it should be added that the mathematics used in physics is not pure mathematics. It is a language — a way of describing the world with symbols, judged by its capacity to account for observation, not by its internal rigor. When this distinction is forgotten, when the language is taken for the thing itself, the model becomes an edifice of invented entities. This is what happened to cosmology. 

Einstein

Albert Einstein is the last of the tradition. He was a physicist of perception: the thought experiment of riding a beam of light, the falling elevator, the intuition that time and space must bend. He did not have the mathematical tools himself — Marcel Grossmann provided them, and the geometry of Riemann and Minkowski did the rest (Einstein, 1905, 1948). 

Einstein marks the end of a lineage. After him, physics would be dominated by formal production. The great conceptual ruptures would come less often, and they would come from within a framework of equations, not before it.

What do these ruptures have in common?

Each of these thinkers, in his own way, did the same thing. They saw something that did not fit. They refused to accept the established reading. They proposed a new one — often before they could prove it, often without the tools to formalize it.

None of them began with equations. All of them began with perception.

This is not a claim that mathematics is useless. It is a claim that the source of conceptual rupture is not mathematical, but perceptual. And it is that mode — the mode of perception, of reading the world before calculating it — that the twentieth century would progressively exclude.

The next chapter examines the moment of transition.

The Shift to All-Mathematics 

The transition did not happen everywhere at once. It happened in a specific place, at a specific time, and among a specific group of people. That place was Brussels. That time was October 1927. Those people were the participants of the Fifth Solvay Conference (Bacciagaluppi & Valentini, 2009).

What Solvay was

The Solvay Conferences were founded in 1911 by Ernest Solvay, a Belgian industrialist, to bring together the leading physicists of the time. 

They were invitation-only, and they were small — around thirty participants. The 1927 edition was devoted to the foundations of quantum mechanics. It gathered Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, Schrödinger, de Broglie, Born, and others. It is often described as the most prestigious gathering of physicists in the twentieth century (Bacciagaluppi & Valentini, 2009). 

The conference is remembered for the confrontation between Einstein and Bohr on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Bohr won. The Copenhagen interpretation became the orthodoxy. But the significance of Solvay 1927 goes far beyond this debate.

The shift in posture

Before Solvay, physics was a discipline of questions. What is light? What is the ether? What is a field? What is a particle? These questions were open, and they were considered legitimate. The unknown was not a failure of the discipline. It was its substance.

After Solvay, the unknown became a problem to be eliminated. The participants of the conference did not say: « We do not know what a quantum object is. » They said: « The question of what a quantum object is has no meaning. »

This is not a minor rhetorical difference. It is a change in what counts as a legitimate scientific question. Bohr insisted that there is no quantum world — only descriptions of measurement results (Bohr, 1935). Heisenberg claimed that concepts such as trajectory or position have no reality before measurement (Heisenberg, 1927). Pauli rejected any attempt to describe what exists behind the formalism. For him, such questions were metaphysical, and therefore illegitimate in physics (Pauli, 1933). 

None of these positions is neutral. Each of them excludes something that physics has always contained. They are decisions about what counts as a legitimate scientific question. But this ignored a completely different reality: the birth of physics in the unknown, in metaphysics. The metaphysical essence of the universe itself — coming from nowhere and going who‑knows‑where. The strangeness of a human being who understands his habitat without understanding his own existence, and who looks so out of place in this absurd natural setting.

By rejecting the unknown, the Copenhagen school adopted a posture of exclusion  toward a reality that exceeded them — precisely to believe, and make others believe, that they did not fear it. Denying the right to the unknown pushed the manipulation of quantum physics forward, still without understanding it, and its application to cosmology completely erased the value of reading, perceiving, and understanding the universe.

The consequences

The consequences of these new rules were not immediate, but they were profound. 

First, the unknown was devalued. If asking what exists is illegitimate, then a scientist who asks it is not a scientist, but a philosopher that will not be taken seriously by his peers.

Mathematical formalism became the primary object. When the question of what is real is set aside, what remains is the calculus. The discipline turns to prediction, to adjustment, to refinement. These activities are useful and produce results, but do not produce new foundations.

And, finally, the discipline closed in on itself. Once the frame is set, the guardians of the frame swarm. They evaluate the next generation, they write the textbooks, they decide what is a legitimate question. And they tend to reproduce themselves.

What survived

It would be too simple to say that after Solvay, the perceptual mode disappeared. It did not. Einstein continued to work after 1927, and his objections to the Copenhagen interpretation were exactly of the perceptual kind. Schrödinger wrote his cat thought experiment in 1935, and it was a perceptual argument, not a mathematical one. Dirac's work on antimatter came from a mathematical formalism, but also from an intuition about symmetry.

What changed is not that perception disappeared. It is that perception ceased to be central. It became a residue, a marginal practice, sometimes tolerated, sometimes ignored. The discipline began to select for a different profile: the one who could manipulate the formalism, refine the model, and produce publishable results. The one who could see what did not fit was no longer the model of a great scientist.

The death of the unknown

This shift has a direct consequence for the way the unknown is treated. In the perceptual mode, the unknown is a starting point. In the formal mode, the unknown is a failure. It is something to be filled, patched, or denied.

The clearest illustration is the vocabulary that emerged after Solvay. The unknown is not called « the unknown », but a parameter, a field, a constant, an energy. Each of these names gives the false impression that it has been identified.

This practice would become central in cosmology. Dark matter, dark energy, inflation, the cosmological constant, black holes — these are not observed entities, but just names given to gaps in the model, to patches (Bull et al., 2016). But since they have names, they can be treated as if they were real. And the question of whether they exist, or of what they really are, is no longer asked. These are products of mathematics, treated unquestionably as physical realities. Like the singularity. Like the Big Bang, this strange genesis halfway between a religious dazzling event and mathematics.

The unknown did not die at Solvay. But it lost its legitimacy. It ceased to be a territory to explore, and became an intruder to eliminate. And the discipline that followed — the one that produced ΛCDM — is the product of this shift.

The Result: ΛCDM

ΛCDM — Lambda Cold Dark Matter — is the current standard model of cosmology. It describes a universe composed of ordinary matter (about 5%), dark matter (about 26%), and dark energy (about 69%) (Planck Collaboration, 2020). 

It posits an initial point somewhere not defined called singularity, followed by an inflationary phase (Guth, 1981), followed by an expansion that continues today. It is taught in every university, cited in every textbook, and used as the framework for the interpretation of every major cosmological observation. 

It is a strange model that accumulates an endless list of flaws, paradoxes, and other inconsistencies. Apparently, this bothers no one, but it seems to be the most dishonest example of scientific behavior: after 60 long years, it continues to be supported. 

Flaws from the first instant

ΛCDM claims that the universe is all that exists. This is not a detail. It is a foundational claim: there is nothing outside the universe, because the universe is by definition everything.

Yet the same model posits a singularity — and a subsequent Big Bang — outside this universe. 

This is not a philosophical quibble. It is a contradiction between two claims made by the same model. And it is present from the first instant.

The endless list of flaws and paradoxes in short

Part of these points are known to all and part result from a new independent study.

1. Mass (Mass is defined by itself in an infinite loop) (Newton, 1687; Mach, 1883) 

2. Black holes (have never been observed)

3. CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background, a radio noise, inadvertently discovered, is interpreted as a fossil, also as the first light of the universe, but without light, without a date and with an age of 380,000 years after the Big Bang when Big Bang never happened and cosmic time to age it does not exist) (Penzias & Wilson, 1965) 

4. Confusion between model and reality (the mathematical model is taken as an ontological description).

5. Incoherent notion of particle (particles = field excitations, yet treated as objects).

6. Dogma everything must be quantized (forced quantization of gravity without conceptual justification).

7. Symmetries vs. reality (mathematical symmetries treated as properties of the real world).

8. Hypothetical energies (vacuum energy, dark energy, vacuum fluctuations) (Weinberg, 1989). .

9. Horizon problem (regions too distant to have ever coordinated) (Guth, 1981). 

10. Flatness problem (the universe is too flat without fine‑tuning) (Guth, 1981).

11. Origin of homogeneity/isotropy (initial homogeneity unexplained).

12. Origin of geometry itself (the model assumes geometry but does not explain it).

13. Cosmological constant (value inexplicable, off by 120 orders of magnitude) (Weinberg, 1989). 

14. Ad hoc cosmic inflation (introduced to fix the model, not predicted by it) (Guth, 1981). 

15. Undetected dark matter (postulated to account for discrepancies) (Bertone & Hooper, 2018). 

16. Unexplained dark energy (introduced to account for cosmic acceleration).

17. Initial singularity (the model diverges at t = 0 and thus does not describe the origin) (Penrose, 1965). 

18. Measurement problem (no internal solution within the paradigm).

19. Insufficient decoherence (does not produce a single outcome).

20. Superposition vs. classicality (no clear transition).

21. Big Bang nucleosynthesis (Describes the formation of light nuclei — but relies on a hot, dense universe, an unverified postulate).

22. Incompatibility between QM and General. Relativity (two conceptually incompatible frameworks).

23. Incompatibility between expansion and the CMB state. (The CMB has none of the properties of an event (no direction, no date, no propagation, no cooling) and all the properties of a fundamental omnipresent state).

24. Curvature of a non‑existent spacetime. (Spacetime is an abstract mathematical construct. A physical deformation is therefore attributed to a non‑physical structure).

25. Higgs boson (Becomes a useless patch if gravity is accepted as a pressure on the GRID, and not as a force) (Higgs, 1964).

This list is not exhaustive.

The pattern

Most of these incongruities have the same structure. An observation is made. The model cannot account for it with its existing entities. Mathematical calculations are produced to elaborate predictions and a new entity, or a new mechanism, is added as a named patch. 

This is exactly how mathematics replaces thought. The technicians apply the formalism without asking whether the model itself is wrong. They white blackboards until a semblance of solution appears. When they reach it, they are confident that they have resolved the flaw.

Conclusion

What must be retained from this replacement of pure perception by mathematics — especially in a field as sensitive as cosmology — is that the universe is not a blackboard, and that equations are therefore not its playground.

These little men — on this little Earth, with its little solar system — are invisible, as is their entire galaxy. They may play the tenors of formulas, but they will never impress this universe that ignores them with such magnificence. They will never draw, nor decide, through their hieroglyphs, what it is.

The only ones capable of doing so are the thinkers, because this is an investigation: imagining what may have happened for today's universe to come about. Since when has this been the mission of mathematics? 

As far as we are concerned — we who are an unconditional part of it — the universe has always existed, and certainly not for 13.7 billion years (Planck Collaboration, 2020). That is merely another absurdity of the current model, which applies human circadian time to the eternity of the universe: the solar system is far too young, and far too non-existent on the cosmic scale, to claim to measure the age of the universe with years based on the ballet of the Sun and the Earth. A ballet that also defines, incidentally, the waking and sleeping time of the only living beings on Earth — an Earth that, it must be repeated, practically does not exist on the cosmic scale. What presumption on the part of men!

Everything in this model is implausible and ridiculous. Had cosmology been entrusted to Walt Disney, one may suppose that his draughtsmen would have done better.

Everything is said. Mathematics, in cosmology, has produced a monster that no longer has anything to do with reality. Anyone who keeps informed of new developments in astrophysics knows how badly this model is being battered by the JWST — the flagship of space technology — which regularly discovers that this or that part of the universe does not correspond to the predictions or definitions in force.

And the worst of it is that this model is taught with fervour in every school of engineering or of cosmology-astrophysics in the world.

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