Re:Physicist offers $10,000 for anyone to scientifically dis...
by tbrownaw on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @01:20PM
(#7938931)
the point of science is to continue to search for ways to disprove things, not to ever prove something
No, the point is to learn things. Any time something is shown to be less likely (disproven) other things must therefore be that same amount more likely. The goal is to concentrate that likeliness in as small an area as possible.
Simply disproving things doesn't help with this. Disproving things that we thought were true helps with this (a star viewed thru a telescope has a disc because of diffraction, not because of similar triangles; the earth really does move). Finding the limits of what we know helps with this (Newtonian mechanics works, but not for extremely small or fast things).
Given infinite possibilities, just disproving some at random won't help. You need to find which possibilities you can learn the most by testing.
There is always a deeper level of understanding and knowledge that could potentially make something previously thought to be true untrue.
This is not a useful way of looking at things. It's better to say, for anything that's true, there are limits within which it is true. Newtonian mechanics is not untrue, it's just not all-encompassing.
Consider all those infinite possibilities as a multi-dimensional space. A particular theory is a region (or set of regions) in that space that are true, and that aren't true. Any one experiment can test one point and see if it matches what the theory says. If you have a cluster of points that are all true or all false, you don't gain anything by testing more points in that same area. You gain by testing points near where the theory says the edge of a region should be. If the edges are all where they should be, you've proved the theory as true (or rather, true enough). If not, it's either wrong or more limited that you thought (it's less true than you thought).
No, the point is to learn things. Any time something is shown to be less likely (disproven) other things must therefore be that same amount more likely. The goal is to concentrate that likeliness in as small an area as possible.
Simply disproving things doesn't help with this. Disproving things that we thought were true helps with this (a star viewed thru a telescope has a disc because of diffraction, not because of similar triangles; the earth really does move). Finding the limits of what we know helps with this (Newtonian mechanics works, but not for extremely small or fast things).
Given infinite possibilities, just disproving some at random won't help. You need to find which possibilities you can learn the most by testing.
There is always a deeper level of understanding and knowledge that could potentially make something previously thought to be true untrue.
This is not a useful way of looking at things. It's better to say, for anything that's true, there are limits within which it is true. Newtonian mechanics is not untrue, it's just not all-encompassing.
Consider all those infinite possibilities as a multi-dimensional space. A particular theory is a region (or set of regions) in that space that are true, and that aren't true. Any one experiment can test one point and see if it matches what the theory says. If you have a cluster of points that are all true or all false, you don't gain anything by testing more points in that same area. You gain by testing points near where the theory says the edge of a region should be. If the edges are all where they should be, you've proved the theory as true (or rather, true enough). If not, it's either wrong or more limited that you thought (it's less true than you thought).