Quote of the Month

From a 2008 astronomy paper, published in Nature:

If, as we have argued, galaxies come from at most a six parameter set, then for gaseous galaxies to appear as a one parameter set, as observed here, the theory of galaxy formation and evolution must supply five independent constraint equations to constrain the observations. This is such a stringent set of requirements that it is hard to imagine any theory, apart from the correct one, fulfilling them all ... a process of hierarchical merging, in which the present properties of any galaxy are determined by the necessarily haphazard details of its last major mergers, hardly seems consistent with the very high degree of organisation revealed in this analysis.