why is the sci go on changing there views?

Answer 1

It's annoying isn't it? There are two main reasons that are, as far as I know, still politically correct:

1/ They don't know everything so when they find something new everyone has a think about how that might affect their views. If it makes a significant change then they do a bit more work, if it looks most probably correct they are happy to modify their views to accomodate the new data - the better/clearer your model of reality the easier it is to think of tests that may disprove parts of it.

2/ What you mostly see and hear under the headings 'scientists say' is predigested, simplified, sensationalised, mangled, media presentations.

Answer 2

If you found out that something you thought you knew was different from how you knew it, would you change your views?

I've just been reading about the glycemic index, for instance. We commonly assumed that simple granulated sugar was the form that most quickly affects the blood sugar levels in the body, but it is not. By the time the body dissolves and assimilates the crystaline sugars, things like alcohol or jasmine rice have already been registering in the blood stream, they work faster. We've discovered that the multiple layers of digestive action affect various foods differently, so simple carbohydrate categories are not enough to guage how the body will use them, the issue is how the sugars and starches come apart and the priority of fuel burning also comes into play. Diets, therefore, are not merely an issue of eating less of everything and exercising more, it has numerous complex factors that vary from person to person.

That is just one of many things. In nanotechnology, we discover that the mechanics we assume in the macro world sometimes don't apply, or apply differently. People used to believe that life began from something as simple as a lightening strike in some pool of complex hydrocarbons, but we've discovered that life is preprogrammed in a virtual binary code of amino acid pairs in a complex polymer called DNA. How to get from organic ooze to bioprogramming makes the accident of life (if it is an accident) all the more amazing. People used to think that the Cambrian layer of ancient rocks show the time when life began because they weren't finding fossils in older rocks. Now we know, that we just weren't looking close enough or in the right older rocks.

So if you keep looking and keep finding new and different things, should you keep the old views? Nope.

Answer 3

Scientists are always finding out new information. They have their theories and believe in them, but they are always looking for something better. Scientists need to keep an open mind. When they find that something better, they let everyone else know.

Answer 4

science is about knowledge, knowledge grows , what we perceive as truth changes