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Once again fails to falsify Einstein's prediction This notion that anything is ever fully proven needs to stop being spread around. Maybe pedantic, but the anti

• acqq 7y ago
  > just withstood another attack That‘s also a wrong simplification. It wasn’t an attack at all. When science reaches new limits and an old theory is confirmed valid even there, what‘s left is even less possibilities for some new theory to make a different prediction. Any new theory must be compatible with the old one in all these already checked places.
  • brabel 7y ago
    > Any new theory must be compatible with the old one in all these already checked places. Just like Einstein's theories are compatible with Newton's at much-lower-than-light speeds.
    • chopin 7y ago
      Mercury would like to have a word with you.
      • seeekr 7y ago
        In case anyone else, like me, were curious about what is likely being referred to: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/05/20/when-did-isaac-newton-finally-fail/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/05/20/when...
        • crankylinuxuser 7y ago
          And here, I though you all were talking about the element of mercury, and how its mass is calculated from the 1s orbital using special relativity :) https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/what-does-mercury-being-liquid-at-room-temperature-have-to-do-with-einsteins-theory-of-relativity/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio...
        • deleted 7y ago
          [deleted]
  • m12k 7y ago
    Right, so we just added another required predictive ability to the more precise theory that will likely eventually supplant Einstein's. I don't see why that is at odds with what I wrote - no matter the outcome of the experiment, a new theory will need to also predict its outcome. But since Einstein's theory also did, we don't currently need to replace it for that reason (we do for other reasons, such as unifying quantum mechanics and relativity).
    • acqq 7y ago
      > we don't currently need to replace it It‘s not about “replacing”: in all the areas where it is already confirmed it doesn’t ever need to be replaced. Wherever Newton’s formulas are good enough they are still used and are going to be used in future. It’s just about extending the limits. And in this case, again, Einstein’s formula are shown to be good enough.
      • m12k 7y ago
        Right, your point is that normally, new theories don't fully refute the existing ones - the existing ones turn out to be special cases of the new one - the old theories are not entirely wrong, but rather only right sometimes. Like how Newtonian physics work fine as long as things are not traveling very fast or are very heavy, at which point we need relativity. I fully agree with this. But being only right sometimes is still a falsification of the theory (as a complete theory to describe and predict all phenomena that it pertains to). My point is that nothing in my top level comment is at odds with this. Relativity has once again not been falsified. Newtonian physics have been falsified (in general - though they are contained as a special case within relativity). The body of evidence that a new theory needs to deal with in order to replace and subsume relativity has just been expanded even more - yay!
        • acqq 7y ago
          No. My points were simply: 1) it was not "an attack" at all but an experiment that confirmed the theory's validity in the limits of the Universe previously unreachable to humans. 2) The "replacement" didn't happen before with Newton's formulas: under the limits under which it was known that Newton's formulas worked before Einstein's it is still known that Newton's formulas work. The basic formulas still being taught about special relativity are actually Lorentz transformations, decades older than Einstein's work and still actively used under the limits where they still work etc. There isn't any "refutation" there it's about having most of the Universe explainable by the formulas we use. The new discoveries aren't "replacements" but "filling the blanks" which remain, and one more area is now confirmed not to be a blank at all.
• wheelerwj 7y ago
  > 'Science is claiming to have all the right answers just as much as religion!' lol what?!? who says that?!?
  • iso1631 7y ago
    Anti science people
    • AmericanChopper 7y ago
      Many pro-science people (including some well known science communicators) don’t need much encouragement to appeal to the ultimate authority of science. There was an HN thread on the munchausen trilemma a little while ago, full of people commenting on how intuitive it was, but absolutely unwilling to accept how it could impact their own beliefs in science.
      • TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
        That's because science is a distillation of consensus experience, not absolute truth. That doesn't make it invalid, because the "experience" part really really matters. But it means its validity is limited to "for all practical purposes" - which is perfectly good enough as a baseline, and certainly more useful than "It's just my opinion and I'm right about everything because I say so" or even "Because my god says so" or "I'm going to lose money if this turns out to be true, so I'm going to spend some money up front on a PR campaign to persuade people it isn't."
  • Netcob 7y ago
    I suggest listening to the podcast "Oh No! Ross and Carrie" if you're interested in weird claims that people make.
• andreareina 7y ago
  Isaac Asmiov's The Relativity of Wrong is a wonderful essay on this. https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.ht...
• DrNuke 7y ago
  > the anti-science crowd latches on to things like this Dark ages are built on anti-science sentiment but we have all the means to counter and disseminate science results these days, provided that discourses are made simpler enough (without being shallow) to inform the general public... we need more and better scientific communicators, then, that’s also why the small content project I am recently pushing over here too.
  • mannykannot 7y ago
    Being a better scientific communicator might mean being more aware of how innocuous statements can be accidentally or deliberately misconstrued.
    • DrNuke 7y ago
      In compiling booklets and summarizing references from all over the world, I am especially learning that less words is more clarity. Also, convoluted prose obfuscates results. It is also evident that some tones are purpotedly built on propaganda or limited span.
• moron4hire 7y ago
  The anti-science crowd is going to be anti-science regardless of how science is reported.
  • TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    But good science teaching and reporting can make the anti-science crowd smaller and less politically influential than it would be otherwise.
    • Wistar 7y ago
      Perhaps, but overcoming the audience's strong prior commitment to anti-science seems to be a tough haul.
    • moron4hire 7y ago
      Got any science to back that up?
  • dmos62 7y ago
    That's misguiding and unproductive. Any group is made up of hard-liners and on-the-fence people, and hard-liners change too, just slower. Being dismissive is as damaging as misinformation. Anti-intellectualism, anti-science, etc. will always attract some people to some degree. Within those constraints there's a world of difference.
    • dvtrn 7y ago
      The second paragraph seems to come across as a mere rephrasing of the exact sentiment the comment the first paragraph so passionately rebukes. Care to dissuade me of this, because it seems like you’ve simultaneously concurred with the statement you’ve called misguiding and unproductive.
      • dmos62 7y ago
        Here's a rephrase. You have to be understanding in order to positively influence people. Therefore, it's unproductive to be dismissive. Anti-scientific sentiment as phenomenon will not disappear, but will be shaped by that positive influence. It's misguiding to leave it at saying that the phenomenon will not disappear, because that implies that the groups in question are outside our influence. Edit: if I'm still coming off vague, a sibling to my original comment says what I wanted to say more succinctly.
• at_a_remove 7y ago
  You have no idea how correct you are on this. I have had to deal with multiple philosophy types who just knew that special relativity (rather than general in this case) could not be right and had a variety of "proofs" against it; key to their delusions was this misapprehension that Michelson-Morley had been done just one time only! Dr. Clifford Will's Was Einstein Right? is a now-dated book about the various experiments over time, which is very handy if you want a summary of just how many attacks have been weathered. I don't doubt that it could use a second volume by now.
  • msla 7y ago
    There's a famous book, never translated into English, titled Hundert Autoren Gegen Einstein or A Hundred Authors Against Einstein; of course, in Einstein's own words, had he been wrong, one would have been enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_theory_of_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_theory_of_rel...
• mannykannot 7y ago
  A somewhat superficial acquaintance with the philosophy of science has led some people to think it is more sophisticated - or even more correct - to talk of theories as not having been falsified rather than having evidence in their support. Having said that, I think the concern here is exaggerated.
  • doublesCs 7y ago
    Even more sophisticated: Theories have: - an expected domain of applicability and might have: - applications (either in the sense of experimental physics, or even applications in the sense of theoretical physics) So a more important question is, do we have evidence against a theory in its domain of applicability in a magnitude that invalidates some use cases? It's perfectly ok if you find evidence against a theory outside of its domain of applicability (i.e. I don't care if it's wrong in situations I didn't expect it to be right) or if that evidence causes errors so small as to make no difference for my applications.
  • m12k 7y ago
    The point isn't really whether a theory is 'not falsified' or 'has evidence in its support' (they sound roughly equivalent, at least if you formulate it 'has _only_ evidence in its support'), the point is that nothing is ever _proven_, it is only ever not yet disproven. We're collecting an ever larger body of evidence that any theory's predictions need to match in order for the theory to not be proven wrong. Of course the more predictions a theory gets right, the less our need for another theory to make better predictions with instead.
• doublesCs 7y ago
  No, you're mistaken. A _prediction_ was made and matches experiment, therefore the _prediction_ was proven correct. I believe you're repeating the idea that "_theories_ aren't proven correct, you can only ever fail to falsify them", which is true. But you're applying the idea to predictions, which makes it false because predictions absolutely can be proven correct. In my opinion you come across as confused about these ideas.
  • m12k 7y ago
    You are correct, my comment should have read 'theory' rather than prediction. Alas it is too late for me to edit it, so it will be forever wrong.
    • brlewis 7y ago
      Fortunately, HN has a list of your other comments, many of which have yet to be proven wrong.
  • eloff 7y ago
    But does it? This is merely one entry in a long line of evidence consistent with the prediction. Wouldn't it be better to say it did not falsify the prediction? If this had not been consistent with the prediction, the precession of Mercury still was, so then one needs to sort out what that means. Was one of the experiments flawed? What's the statistical certainty of each, etc. I don't see how a prediction can be proven true anymore than a theory can.
• msla 7y ago
  > No it doesn't, it has a long, long list of wrong answers, and a short list of answers that haven't yet been proven wrong, which makes up our current best approximation of 'the truth'. "So you're saying that science doesn't know anything, and therefore quantum vibrations homeopathy Reiki is just as real as General Relativity." Or something. My point is, the anti-science crowd will use anything it can, including lies, to "prove" that it's right and you're wrong. The people who are so emotionally damaged they can't stand the idea that the universe might require effort on their part to understand will always find ways to misunderstand things. Trying to communicate with them is futile.
• Florin_Andrei 7y ago
  > the anti-science crowd latches on to things like this Truly fundamental misunderstandings are hard to correct.
• d0mine 7y ago
  Within their domain, scientific theories once discovered are true forever e.g., Newton's laws of motion are true for cases that are not too fast (special relativity limit), too small (quantum effects), too massive (general relativity limit).