"Indeed, there is a now a minority of cosmologists who question a beginning of the universe at all; instead they favor a cyclic model with a series of expansions and contractions."
John W. Moffat is a Danish-born Canadian physicist. He is currently professor emeritus of physics at the University of Toronto and is also an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo and a resident affiliate member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
"A large part of the relativity community is in denial - refusing even to contemplate the idea that black holes may not exist in nature, or seriously consider the idea that any kind of new matter such as the new putative dark energy can play a fundamental role in gravity theory."
"Today, like the elusive planet Vulcan in the nineteenth century, dark matter is accepted by the majority of astronomers and physicists as actually existing. Dark matter, although it has never been seen, is part of the generally accepted standard model of physics and cosmology, which also includes the big bang beginning of the universe."
"The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant had conjectured that Messiers nebulae were distant "island universes" outside our Milky Way galaxy, but many scientists in the early twentieth century disagreed."
"Inflation itself proceeds at a speed faster than the measured speed of light."
"It is difficult to falsify the hypothesis of dark matter, because, as with Ptolemys epicycles, true believers can always add additional arbitrary features and free parameters to overcome any conceivable difficulties that occur with the dark matter models."
"This is the only sure way I know to counter the anti-Copernican idea that the universe is accelerating in our epoch - to get rid of the problem entirely!"