ABSTRACT
For Aristotle and the majority of his followers, the earth is at rest at the centre of the universe, with the planets and other heavenly bodies revolving round it on a number of concentric spheres. This chapter talks about the extent to which science can in fact succeed in attaining a complete and totally objective theory of the world, uncontaminated by human perceptions and concerns. The history of science, particularly over the last century, is full of cases of 'self-evident' assumptions being challenged, such as the constancy of physical magnitudes, or the existence of absolute simultaneity between events. Science does not teach that groups of elementary particles have observable properties, even when the groups are large, except in so far as they create in our brains observable images of the unobservable things. Similarly, from the point of view of the manifest image of common sense, parts of something observable, however small, remain in principle observable.
