Originally posted by Nicksten
I can use the same "retorics" to say that science is totally false as some scientists said that nothing is faster than the speed of light until recently they found something faster. They don't agree with each other thus there is no truth in science. You see the fail in this???
Wow do you fail to comprehend how science works.
The recent (potential, it is not confirmed) discovery of what looks like neutrinos travelling faster than light
and the subsequent, and ongoing, investigations into whether this is a real phenomena or an experimental
error, is a beautiful example of how science is meant to work.
First, special relativity says that nothing can be accelerated past the speed of light, it doesn't preclude something
being created that is already travelling faster than light. (This would be postulated as occurring during a particle
collision or decay where one of the created products started with a superluminal velocity.)
This has never been observed (possibly until now) but antimatter was first predicted as possible by theory years
before it was actually discovered.
Second, any and all theories in science are constantly being tested because the purpose of science is to create as
accurate a picture and model of the reality we live in as possible.
Nothing is assumed to be true, and no theory ever graduates to 'truth' but simply gets more and more supported by
evidence and trusted until such a time as evidence is found that contradicts it.
At which point it is discarded or revised to account for the new information.
Third, Science isn't about finding 'truth', it is about searching for truth, but never getting there, or at least never
knowing if you have got there. There is no way of determining if a theory is actually true, or just close enough that no
present experiment probes reality close enough to detect the error.
The classic example of this is Newtonian gravity being replaced with general relativity (GR).
When Newton came up with his theory of gravity (which included his law of universal gravity, theory's include and are made
from laws and facts bound together with an explanatory framework) the tools for measuring the orbits of planets and moons
as they orbited around the sun or their host planet, was very primitive, and not very accurate.
Given the rather large error margins in the known positions and velocities of the orbiting bodies, Newtonian gravity predicted
the future locations of the planets perfectly. In that the planets and moons always turned up inside the predicted zone in
which they were expected to turn up.
Later, when more advanced telescopes and methods were devised, and more observations were made, some of the known
outer planets started not showing up inside the now reduced expected volumes.
The posited explanation for this was that they were being 'perturbed' from their orbits by planets further out.
The locations and existence of these more distant planets duly predicted astronomers went hunting and found these planets.
Exactly as Newtonian gravity predicted.
Then observations got even more precise, and Mercury started turning up outside of its now even smaller predicted volume.
And so a planet even closer in to the sun was postulated to explain it... they even named it... Vulcan.
However this planet doesn't exist, observations confirmed that no planet could be closer to the sun without us being able to see it.
Then along comes Einstein, who looks again at gravity, and comes up with a new theory, GR, this theory was subtly different from
Newtonian gravity and made slightly different predictions for the planets orbits, within the accuracy of available measurement of the
time Newton and Einstein agreed on the locations of the planets for all bar one of them, Mercury.
GR predicts Mercury's orbit to within the accuracy of our measurement, and also accurately predicts the orbits of all kinds of other objects
we have since observed in the universe, as well as accurately predicting the amount of light bending caused by gravity, which Newtonian
gravity gets wrong, but was not possible to measure in Newtons day.
However we still teach and use Newtonian gravity, because Newtonian gravity is arithmetically much much simpler, and for many circumstances
produces a result that is identical to GR to the number of measured decimal places. Which is why the Apollo missions used Newtonian gravity
to calculate their orbits and not GR.
However despite the fact that we have yet to find a single piece of evidence or make any observation that contradicts GR measured to an
incredible number of decimal places, GR is almost certainly wrong.
It is incompatible with Quantum theory of the Standard model, and predicts singularities where it breaks down.
GR is the best theory of gravity we have ever produced and is insanely accurate and nothing contradicts it but it is also almost certainly wrong.
However whatever we replace it with will have to give exactly the same answers for every experiment we have ever done that confirms GR.
In the same way that GR gives exactly the same answer as Newtonian gravity for all the experiments where Newtonian Gravity gave the right answer.
Now getting back to our potential FTL neutrinos, and special relativity.
SR has also been tested to an unbelievably high degree, every time we accelerate particles around a particle accelerator we are testing SR, every time
you check your position with GPS you are testing SR (and GR for that matter), we have done literally trillions upon trillions of experiments that confirm SR.
If this new observation turns out to be real (and that's a really big if) then whatever replaces it would have to explain all those trillions of experiments
where SR does work as well as this new case where it doesn't. (including other observations of neutrino velocities)
Now there are some contenders for a Grand Unified Theory Of Everything (GUT) which hope to replace the Standard model and GR which potentially do
explain this experimental result. In which case this would be the first piece of evidence supporting one (or more ) of these new models over the standard
model and GR. Which would be really exciting for physics, and would allow us to rule in or out some of our possibilities and kick start new physics.
It certainly doesn't prove that science is wrong or unreliable or trustworthy.
Everything we have already confirmed about SR and GR and the standard model will still hold and be reliable.
In the same way that a navel gunner or tank commander doesn't worry about the fact that their trajectory calculations are made using Newtonian gravity,
and not GR, because Newtonian Gravity still works for calculating trajectories, despite having been proved not to be actually true.
Science isn't about finding truth, it's about searching for it.
All scientific theories are mostly right, but they are also all slightly wrong.
We test them constantly to find out where the bits that are wrong are, so we can make them more right and less wrong.
This is how science operates, and after centuries of work, the amount by which we are wrong is really really tiny.
It will never be (or we will never be able to determine it to be) that we can determine a theory to be absolutely true, but we constantly work to get
as close to that as possible.
Even science believes in creation.
11 Jan '12 13:411 edit
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