Neil  Degrasse Tyson: “If none of us knew in advance that stars exist,  frontline research would offer plenty of convincing reasons for why stars could never form.” [1]

Richard  Panek: “Cosmologists have another saying they like to cite: ‘You get to  invoke the tooth fairy only once,’ meaning dark matter, ‘but now we  have to invoke the tooth fairy twice,’ meaning dark energy.” [2]

Trimble  and Aschwanden: “Most of us are persuaded that stars form out of more  diffuse material which must, therefore, condense, contract, accrete etc.  nevertheless, nearly all observations of pre-main-sequence and  proto-stars are dominated by outflowing stuff.” [3]

Carlos Frenk: “We don’t understand how a single star forms, yet we want to understand how 10 billion stars form.” [4]

Lada and Shu: “The origin of stars represents one of the most fundamental unsolved problems of contemporary astrophysics.” [5]

West,  Cote, Marzke and Jordan: “Nearly a century after the true nature of  galaxies was established, their origin and evolution remain great  unsolved problems of modern astrophysics.” [6]

Trimble  and Aschwanden: “The formation of galaxies and large scale structures  remains ‘TMIUPIMA’… ‘The most important unsolved problem in modern  astrophysics’…” [7]

Joseph Silk: “A completely satisfactory theory of galaxy formation remains to be formulated.” [8]

Science  Daily: “The presence of such fully evolved galaxies so early in the  life of the cosmos is hard to explain and has been a major puzzle to  astronomers studying how galaxies form and evolve.” [10]

Carlos  Frenk: “We just simply don’t know the answer to the question ‘how did  the universe begin?’. There are things that all cosmologists don’t know  the answer to, many questions, that’s one of the main ones, how did the  universe begin?” [11]

Charles  Seife: “Why a superflare has not occurred on the Sun in recorded  history is unclear. ‘I think a consensus is emerging that our Sun is  extraordinarily stable.’ suggests Galen Gisler” [12]

Amy  Barr: “Is there a self-consistent single-impact and disk evolution  scenario that is consistent with the masses, angular momentum, lunar  iron fraction, and isotope/volatile compositions of the Earth and Moon?  ls the initial thermal state of the Moon consistent with its formation  from an impact-generated disk?” [13]

Science  Daily: “We are really amazed – these are the earliest, oldest galaxies  found to date. Their existence was not predicted by theory… we’re  detecting galaxies we never expected to find, having a wide range of  properties we never expected to see.” [14]

European  Southern Observatory: “The discovery of such a complex and mature  structure so early in the history of the universe is highly surprising.  Indeed, until recently it would have been deemed impossible.” [15]

Karl  Glazebrook: “We expected to find basically zero massive galaxies beyond  about 9 billion years ago, because theoretical models predict that  massive galaxies form last. Instead we found highly developed galaxies  that just shouldn’t have been there, but are.” [16]

Jurgen  Blum: “The processes that led to the formation of the planetary bodies  in the Solar system are still not fully understood.” [17]

Jeff  Cuzzi: “How the first stage of this process, primary accretion, works  is a fundamental unsolved problem of planetary science.” [18]

Martin  Harwit: “Growth of planets may occur through their gravitational  accretion into large bodies. Just how that takes place is not  understood.” [19]

Jurgen Blum: “The formation of planetesimals, the kilometre-sized planetary precursors, is still a puzzling process.” [20]

Michael  S. Turner: “Because of its multiple close connections to important  problems in both physics and astronomy, cosmic acceleration may be the  most profound mystery in science. Its solution could shed light on or be  central to unravelling other important puzzles, including the cause of  cosmic inflation, the vacuum energy problem, supersymmetry and  superstrings, neutrino mass, new gravitational physics, and even dark  matter.” [21]

Steven  Weinberg: “The present generation of young physicists may envy those of  us who had the excitement and delight of developing the standard model.  This might be a mistake, just as it turned out that my generation would  have been mistaken to envy the earlier heroes of quantum  electrodynamics. Our newly minted experimentalists and theorists now  have a chance to participate in making the next big step beyond the  standard model. They may even be able to see their way clear to the very  high energy scale where a final theory will be revealed.” [22]

Christopher  Smeenk and George Ellis: “Many discussions of origins pursue a more  ambitious target: they aim to explain the creation of the universe “from  nothing”. The target is the true initial state, not just the boundary  of applicability of the SM. The origins are supposedly then explained  without positing an earlier phase of evolution; supposedly this can be  achieved, for example, by treating the origin of the universe as a  fluctuation away from a vacuum state. Yet obviously a vacuum state is  not nothing: it exists in a spacetime, and has a variety of non-trivial  properties. It is a mistake to take this explanation as somehow directly  addressing the metaphysical question of why there is something rather  than nothing.” [23]

Richard  Dawkins: “I would really really like to know how life started, it is  something that we absolutely don’t know at the moment.” [24]

Paul Davies: “We have almost no idea how life did originate.” [25]

Paul  Davies: “Nobody knows how a mixture of lifeless chemicals spontaneously  organised themselves into the first living cell.” [26]

Rebecca  Morelle: “Hot acidic waters containing clay do not provide the right  conditions for chemicals to assemble themselves into pioneer organisms.”  [27]

L.  Dicks: “Some biologists marvel that there is any evolution at all,  considering the possible pitfalls of change. The idea is that organisms  are so complex that it is very hard to change one aspect without  wrecking everything else.”[28]

Richard  Dawkins: “The feature of living matter that most demands explanation is  that it is almost unimaginably complicated in directions that convey a  powerful illusion of deliberate design.” [29]

Charles  Darwin: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed,  which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive,  slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” [30]

David  Reznick and Rober Ricklefs: “Macroevolution posed a problem to Darwin  because his principle of descent with modification predicts gradual  transitions between small-scale adaptive changes in populations and  these larger-scale phenomena, yet there is little evidence for such  transitions in nature. Instead, the natural world is often characterized  by gaps, or discontinuities. One type of gap relates to the existence  of 'organs of extreme perfection', such as the eye, or morphological  innovations, such as wings, both of which are found fully formed in  present-day organisms without leaving evidence of how they evolved.”  [31]

Charles  Darwin: “Although naturalists very properly demand a full explanation  of every difficulty from those who believe in the [im]mutability of  species, on their own side they ignore the whole subject of the first  appearance of species in what they consider reverent silence.” [32]

Charles  Darwin: “All the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth  have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first  breathed.” [33]

K  Than: “While the new study links the evolution of flight to the  ascension of insects, it raises new questions about how and why they  evolved wings in the first place, said study co-author Kevin Boyce, an  associate professor of geological sciences at Stanford Earth. ‘In the  Devonian, there were only a few insects, all wingless,’ Boyce said. ‘But  you come out the other side and we have flight. What happened in  between? Good question.’.” [34]

Michael Denton: “Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis.” [35]

Charles  Darwin: “Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated  organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest  objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as  I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.” [36]

Cleveland  Hickman: “Studies conducted since Darwin’s time have failed to produce a  continuous series of fossils as predicted.”[37]

Richard  Dawkins: “The Cambrian strata of rocks, in which we find most of the  major invertebrate groups, and we find many of them already in an  advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as  though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.”  [38]

Elizabeth  Pennisi: “When flowering plants show up in the fossil record, they  appear with a bang, with no obvious series of intermediates… The  ancestor just is not there.” [39]

Mary  Schweitzer: “Schweitzer was studying thin slices of bones from a T.  rex. under a microscope, it appeared that the bone was filled with red  disks. Later, Schweitzer recalls, ’I looked at this and I looked at this  and I thought, this can’t be. Red blood cells don’t preserve.’ …maybe  the textbooks were wrong about fossilization.” [40]

Brian  Switek: “They concluded that the arched back seen in so many fossils  was the result of the expiring dinosaur’s final death throes and  immersion in water.” [41]

References:

[1] Tyson, Neil Degrasse, Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. 2007, p. 187.

[2] Panek, Richard, “Out There”, New York Times Magazine, 11 March 2007.

[3] Trimble, V., Aschwanden, M. J., “Astrophysics in 2000.” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 113:1025-1114, September 2001.

[4] Frenk, Carlos. as quoted in “Surveys Scour the Cosmic Deep.” Science 303:1750, 19 March 2004.

[5] Lada, Charles J., and Shu, Frank H., 4 May 1990. “The Formation of Sunlike Stars.” Science248:564.

[6] West, M.J., Cote, P., Marzke R.O., and Jordan, A. “Reconstructing Galaxy Histories from Globular Clusters.” Nature427:31-35, 1 January 2004.

[7] Trimble, V., Aschwanden, M. J., “Astrophysics in 2000.” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 113:1025-1114, September 2001.

[8] Silk, Joseph., The Big Bang,  New York: Henry Holt, 2000, p. 23.

[10] “Old Galaxies Stick Together in the Young Universe”, Science Daily, 4 April 2008.

[11] Frenk, Carlos, Royal Society Summer Science Online, filmed on 17 July 2020. (https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2020/summer-science-online/programme/friday/)

[12]Seife, Charles, “Thank our lucky star”, New Scientist 2168, 9 January 1999. (https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16121682-600-thank-our-lucky-star/) 

[13]Barr, Amy. C., “On the Origin of Earth’s Moon”, J. Geophys. Res., 121, 1573-1601, doi:10.1002/2016JE005098.

[14] “Astronomical Surprise: Massive Old Galaxies Starve to Death in the Infant Universe”, Science Daily, 21 March 2005. www.sciencedaily.com

[15]  European Southern Observatory Press Release, “Surprise Discovery of  Highly Developed Structure in the Young Universe.” 2 March 2005. www.eso.org

[16] Glazebrook, Karl. “Glimpse at Early Universe Reveals Surprising Mature Galaxies” Science Daily July 2004.

[17]  Blum, Jurgen., “Evidence for the formation of comet  67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko through gravitational collapse of a bound  clump of pebbles”, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 469, Issue Suppl_2, July 2017, Pages S755–S773, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stx2741, 25 October 2017.

[18] Cuzzi, Jeff., “Planets: the first movement” Nature448 (30 Aug 2007) p. 1003.

[19] Harwit, Martin, Astrophysical Concepts, 2nd Ed., p. 553 (2006).

[20] Blum, Jurgen, and Wurm, G., “The Growth Mechanisms of Macroscopic Bodies in Protoplanetary Disks” Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Vol. 46: 21-56 (Sept 2008) p. 21.

[21]Turner, Michael. S., “Dark Energy and the Accelerating Universe” The Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 3 June 2008. 46:385–432 (astro.annualreviews.org doi: 10.1146/annurev.astro.46.060407.145243)

[22]Weinberg, Steven, “Essay: Half a Century of the Standard Model”, Physical Review Letters 121, 220001 (2018), 27 November 2018. (https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.220001)

[23]  Smeenk, Christopher and George Ellis, "Philosophy of Cosmology", The  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (26 Sep 2017), Edward N. Zalta  (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/cosmology/)

[24]  Dawkins, Richard., “Life, The Universe, And Everything”, filmed on 17  April 2015 at the Academia Film Olomouc Science Film Festival, Czech  Republic. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGHUZ3ncz5A)

[25] Davies, Paul., Fitness of the Cosmos for Life: Biochemistry and Fine-Tuning, edited by John D. Barrow, et al., Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 107.

[26] Davies, Paul., “Was life on Earth born lucky?” New Scientist, 12 July 2003. (https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17924034-700-was-life-on-earth-born-lucky/)

[27]Morelle, Rebecca., “Darwin’s warm pond idea is tested” BBC News, 13 February 2006. (news.bbc.co.uk) 

[28]Dicks, L., “The creatures time forgot”, New Scientist 164(2209):39, 1999.

[29] Dawkins, Richard., A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2003, p. 79.

[30] Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection 5th Edition, 1869 p. 169.

[31] Reznick, David. N., Ricklefs, Robert E., “Darwin's bridge between microevolution and macroevolution”, Nature, 457(7231):837, 12 February 2009.

[32] Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection 5th Edition, 1869 p. 419.

[33] Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection 5th Edition, 1869 p. 420.

[34]Than, K., “Insects took off when they evolved wings Stanford researchers find”, Stanford News, 23 January 2018 (https://news.stanford.edu/2018/01/23/insects-took-off-evolved-wings/).

[35] Denton, Michael., Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis,Discovery Institute Press, 2016.

[36] Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection 5th Edition, 1869 p. 246.

[37]Hickman, Cleveland, Animal Diversity, McGraw Hill, New York, p. 123, 2008.

[38] Dawkins, Richard., The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence Reveals a Universe Without Design, New York, Norton, 1987, p. 229.

[39] Pennisi, Elizabeth, “On the origin of flowering plants”, Science324(5923):28,30, 3 April 2009.

[40] Schweitzer, Mary, as quoted in “Dinosaur shocker”, Smithsonian Magazine, May 2006.

[41] Switek, Brian, “Watery secret of the dinosaur death pose”, New Scientist, 23 November 2011. (https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21207-watery-secret-of-the-dinosaur-death-pose/)