Is Science Real?

Question

Why do people consider today's scientific "fact" as "fact" when we have a written history of scientific "fact" that turned out to be incorrect as years passed?

Since something only becomes scientific "fact" when it gets wide acceptance by the peer review process, such a process does nothing to prove the theory as "fact" to a godhead.

Also any new "facts" will not easily be accepted into the scientific community if they contradict previous science, which is why it takes years for new "facts" to take the place of old "facts."

So why do people put so much stock into science, when it is clearly just a collection of "best guess" theories that are accepted as custom allows and subject to change at anytime by a persuasive academic article?

what makes some of you idiots think i don't "believe" in science because i asked a well aticulated question about how data is derived and interpreted?

Are you all so reactionary that to question the scientific process is some kind of heresy committed by a religious lunatic?

What kind of scientific mind would try to stifle questions that ensure the methodology remains proper and efficient?

ALSO- To Dkstringer24- If Good scientists don't spout off and argue aboutt "facts"....because nothing is science is a fact and most of us know that.

Good, I'll forward your comments to Al Gore and the "climate Scientists" who tell me that global warming is a "fact."

Answer 1

I believe it is summed up best by a conversation that Kirk, Spock, and McCoy had in Star Trek IV:

Kirk: "Mr. Spock, have you accounted for the variable mass of whales and water in your time re-entry program?"
Spock: "Mr. Scott cannot give me exact figures, Admiral. So I will... Make a guess."
Kirk: "A guess? You? Spock, that's extrordianary."
Spock: "I don't think he understands..."
Bones: "No Spock, it means that he trusts your guesses more than most other people's facts"

Think about that last line for a bit. That is why we trust science. Because, although you're absolutely right, every scientific theory that we have come up with is merely a best guess, and many of those guesses have been subsequently proven wrong, they are still more reliable than most other people's facts. Consider some other sources of "fact":

Religous proclomation
Tradition (particularly "time-honered" alternative "medicine")
Intuition
Untested guesses (as opposed to tested guesses - i.e. science).

It is readily seen that religious proclamations need not have anything to do with reality at all, because whether they are accepted as "divine revelation" depends not on whether they are true, or in any way correspond to reality, but rather whether the "prophet" giving them is sufficiently persuasive, and his constituents sufficiently gullible, to generate a new religion. And that they do not have anything to do with reality is easily proven by noting that the many religous traditions all contradict each other, which if they were true simply could not happen.

Tradition is even worse, because just because something is really old doesn't make it any more true than it was 2000 years ago. Proponents of "traditional medicine" sometimes argue that it couldn't have survived thousands of years if it was completely useless, but we need only look at something like astrology to see that things regularly survive thousands of years despite complete uselessness.

Intuition and untested guesses seem like they could be reliable, but when you consider that every scientific or folk theory that has ever been disproven originated as one of those two things, we see that they are unreliable in the extreme. Now if we never tested our assumptions, or worse, continued believing them when they had been proven wrong, we would know almost nothing. That's where science improves on those methods: it doesn't accept any theory until it has been tested as thoroughly as possible, and abandons theories that conflict with existing evidence. And this allows us to have some knowledge of the universe. We don't know our theories are right - Hume teaches us that we can never know for certain whether the universe will continue to behave as we think it does, no matter how many observations we make - but what we know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that our theories are not so hopelessly wrong that they would give substantially different results in any of the areas that have been tested. This is why, when a scientific theory is shown to be incorrect, it usually is not completely overturned, but rather just restricted to a small domain of validity. As an example, the theory of relativity did not completely overturn newtowian mechanics, because newtownian mechanics is approximately equivalent to relativistic mechanics at velocities of the sort we had been previously able to test, and so newton's laws of motion still apply as a special case, even though they are technically wrong. Similarly, when the first chemical reactions with Xenon were performed, it didn't overturn the idea that noble gases were unreactive, it merely amended it with the term "usually." This is the level of knowledge that science gives us - the knowledge that we are not hopelessly, completely, and totally wrong. And although that's not saying much, it is still more than you can say about the "facts" derived through any other method.

And that's why we trust science.

Answer 2

I'd basically agree with everything that dkstringer24 said. However, I think that the word "fact" can still be reasonably used in science. I think of "facts" as observations that any reasonable person who looks at the same thing can agree on. So, the fact that the sun comes up in the east and sets in the west is a fact. The observation that objects will fall if you let go of them is a fact. Most people would agree with the fact that the organisms alive today are very different than those alive 70 million years ago. It is a fact that organisms are composed of one or more cells.

So, there are a whole host of "facts" that everyone can agree on. How those facts fit into the larger picture, and what the explanations of those "facts" are is where science becomes tentative.

You're quite right that what was once considered to be true (that the earth is the center of the solar system, for example) is no longer a correct interpretation. All theories in science are tentative. They are not our best guess, but are the best explanation for a whole bunch of facts.

Answer 3

I don't know what "facts" you're ranting about.

If it's the so-called fact that the diet sold as brand name X is better than the diet sold as brand name Y, then it should not be too difficult to distinguish how the word "fact" is used in commercial slogans and how it's used in science.

If it's the story of Newton's optics or the phlogiston theory, then yes. But such cases are becoming more and more exceptional. In fact, there's not a single "fact" in my 30 years old science school books that have been busted in the meantime.

If it's the "fact" that fruit bats are evolutionary related to bats, as you can read in old school books, or the explanation given in some schoolbooks for the fact that ice is slippery, then OK. But those are minor details, it won't let anybody's whole understanding of the World collapse when such a "fact" gets busted.

Btw, very few scientific theory ever become so widely accepted that we call them "facts". Getting something through the peer reviewing is certainly not enough. Although the peer review process ensures that scientific journals are more reliable than any other news sources, we recognize that they are far from perfect.

Answer 4

Everything in science is a theory...not a fact. We make observations using the best available technology and come up with theories as to how things work. It's not perfect but since when is anything perfect?

Why do people put such stock into science....?????

The only reason people live as long as they do is because of science. We develop medicines and create a higher standard of living.

Good scientists don't spout off and argue about "facts"....because nothing is science is a fact and most of us know that. It's simply true until we get new/better information.

Science is a field that is always changing...and you can't be afraid of change or afraid of being wrong....

Hey if you don't like science....goto church instead of the doctor next time you're sick....although if you do that the theory of "survival of the fittest" may make an example out of you


EDIT...first of all...Al Gore is not a scientist...he's a politician and they throw words like "fact" around almost as much as you do in your ridiculous rant....

Second of all...you did not ask a "well articulated question about how data is derived and interpreted".....you went on a rant about how science is BS because a lot of the time we come to different conlusions based on new information....

Are you really so fearfull of change....that you can't accept it when better data comes along???

If anything...new interpretations and subsequent evaluations of those interpretations lead to better science and a larger knowledge base...

Even when conclusions are wrong...a lot of the time new methodology and technology comes from studies with bad conclusions....

It's not reactionary to point out the flaws in your logic...it's what scientists do all day long....

Answer 5

Is science real? Hmmm....How exactly do you answer that question? Yes, it is real. Science is the only self-correcting philosophy that exists. Theory is exactly that a theory, backed by evidence that supports it, but at the same time there is always another scientist trying to disprove existing theories by discovering new evidence. Theories are not just guesses, they use all of the existing info and try to explain that info, but we don't have all the info , so as more comes in we re-define those explanations.

Answer 6

next time you use any drug think about it. someone made that using science. if you don't believe in science don't eat processed foods, take any medication (legal or illegal), deal with plastic, or have anything to do with modern life. it is because of scientists that you have the life you live. if science wasn't real than modern civilization wouldn't exist.

theories might be proven wrong, but that's because we're able to look deeper and deeper as instrumentation develops. we don't claim to know everything. neither should you

Answer 7

science

the scientific method has the only tool to distinguish

real from unreal

fact from fiction

Answer 8

As real as art, music, or engineering. More real than religion.