4 ms·
Articles like this illustrate the extent that the general public does not understand science. No scientific theory or observation is ever indisputably resolved
by troystribling 18y ago
Articles like this illustrate the extent that the general public does not understand science. No scientific theory or observation is ever indisputably resolved and closed to debate.
- rkowalick 18y agoApparantly you don't either. There are plenty of scientific theories that are indisputably resolved and closed to debate.
- troystribling 18y agoI think indisputable and what a scientific assertion is not clear. I would interpret an indisputable assertion as having probability 1 of accurately describing a collection of observations. Falsifiability, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability, is used by many to define an assertion as scientific. From the article, "Sophisticated methodological falsification, on the other hand, is a prescription of a way in which scientists ought to behave as a matter of choice. The object of this is to arrive at an evolutionary process whereby theories become less bad". A scientific assertion will never have a probability of 1 of describing a set of observations since the supporting observations are of a finite accuracy. There are many scientific theories that have many supporting observations within a range of parameters, so have a high probability of describing those observations, but none describe the observations with probability 1. I worked as a theoretical physicist for about 10 years and never worked on anything where I did not make a set of approximations and assumptions that left me with doubts about the accuracy of any assertion I made.