3 ms·
I'm an experimental scientist. My take would be that truth is reachable, but the Truth with a capital T is a potentially meaningless throwback to a past age of
by analog31 4y ago
I'm an experimental scientist. My take would be that truth is reachable, but the Truth with a capital T is a potentially meaningless throwback to a past age of certainty.
What I mean is that some theories have been corroborated to the point that they can be regarded as "truth" for all intents and purposes, and despite known limitations in some cases. Examples might include electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, gravitation, and biological evolution.
Regarding those theories, we can still say that we accept them on a tentative basis, but it would not be irrational to assign a vanishingly low likelihood that any of them will be radically overturned.
- naasking 4y agoRadically overturned is an overstatement I think. The theories you've listed are all tautologically valid in the domains in which we've tested them. What will happen is that either they will continue to hold in new domains where they haven't yet been tested, or we will discover a more general theory that will reduce to these theories in the limit.
- jhanschoo 4y agoIndeed, to illustrate; Einstein and Planck doesn't mean that for most of our lived experience and work, classical mechanics offers a far more useful model of the world.