The neighborhood of the two words in the title of this note, at first glance, seems impossible. Scientists - and suddenly cowardly! This cannot be! Science always boldly strides forward, opening far horizons of thought, solving the most difficult problems and sweeping away obstacles in its path. But, as shown by only the two examples below, the life of science and its leaders is far from easy. Cowardly scientists, scholars of self-seekers, were, are and will certainly remain.
First example: exploration of near-earth space and astronautics. To doubt that the Americans have been to the moon is considered in serious scientific circles to be a manifestation of naivety, ignorance, and just bad form. No matter how you seek, curious, answers to the questions why the Apollo cosmonauts walked along the deck of an aircraft carrier with such cheerfulness to report on a safe arrival from the Moon, how they were lucky enough to survive in the deadly streams of cosmic radiation, where hundreds of kilograms of brought lunar stones are located and why these stones are so reliably hidden, none of the authoritative scientists will give you a clear answer. Meanwhile, the answer to all the above questions is as simple as the truth itself: they were not there! But everyone is afraid: administrators, scientists, even courageous astronauts - they are afraid of losing their jobs and lives,fulfilling obligations to lie further about successful flights of people to the Moon. The times of Giordano Bruno and Galileo have passed, and their decency and scientific adherence to principles have long been ridiculed by modern intellectuals.
The second example is a little more complicated: the theory of relativity and gravity.
For over a hundred years, Einstein's "greatest theory of relativity" has been hailed by all the media. Her criticism has been declared scientific ignorance, and sometimes a manifestation of outrageous anti-Semitism. If there are experimenters who dare to present in their scientific articles the results that contradict the theory of relativity, on the part of orthodox relativists they are subjected to silence or, on the contrary, to amicable defamation. These researchers, and at the same time the journals in which their articles are published, are contemptuously called the coarsest, even obscene, epithets. A wonderful scientific ideology was proclaimed: "physics without the theory of relativity is the physics of monkeys!" (however, among these "monkeys" should be mentioned those who did not know the theory of relativity, Newton, Lomonosov, Faraday, Maxwell, Mendeleev and many others). For instance,an experimental physicist obtained results proving a decrease in the force of gravity with an increase in the temperature of interacting bodies. No "serious" scientific journal will dare to publish these results for fear of losing the status of a scientific publication. And the thing is that a decrease in the force of gravity with an increase in the temperature of bodies clearly contradicts Einstein's theory and, in particular, indicates the impossibility of gravitational compression (collapse) to the state of a "black hole" - a favorite, very lucrative (bringing in considerable income) topic of modern theorists -astrophysicists. As in the first example, the reason for the noted scholarly cowardice is, in essence, the fear of fellow scholars of losing their jobs, simply the "feeding trough". This fear is so great that reputable scientists shy away from supporting experimental research,in which the effects of the theory of relativity (after all, what the hell is not joking!) may not be confirmed - so they, the authorities, are calmer.
The phenomenon of cowardly scientists is fairly typical of modern science. Its emergence is associated both with the decline of social significance, the authority of science, and with the introduction into the scientific environment of all sorts of showmen and "businessmen" (in other words, scoundrels) from science. Only a genius can drive these merchants out of the temple of science.
Author: A. L. Dmitriev