Scientific theories are not likely to be true: they are either true enough to be taken seriously or false enough to be dead. Accumulation of evidence and knowle

Scientific theories are not likely to be true: they are either true enough to be taken seriously or false enough to be dead. Accumulation of evidence and knowledge makes scientific theories descend a ladder of wrongness that goes from unthinkable, to utterly ridiculous, to wrong but respectably clever, to somewhat grounded in reality, to good enough approximations for some purposes, to best in class but not perfect, to positively agreeing with all available evidence. Given equally true theories scientists look to other properties to establish theory quality, and simplicity is a philosophically important one: it represents the belief that natural laws should be as simple and elegant as evidence allows them to be.