how can science be sure about anything universal?

Question

if we are stuck on this rock. We are like goldfish looking around a room from inside a bowl while the great outside is largely unknown.

Answer 1

I ask myself similar questions. Beyond our immediate solar system, the farther we look into the distant cosmos, the farther we are looking back in time, so that what we are seeing in the far reaches of the universe happened millions of years ago. Even though light travels at the speed of 186,000 miles per seconds, the nearest stars are light years away; imagine how many miles those light years equal, especially the distances to stars/galaxies that are thousands or millions of light years from here. How can we know whether or not they even exist presently? I have read, too, that we can only ever visualize a portion of the cosmos, so can have no concept of what may exist which we will never see. Scientists calculate that everything in the universe is traveling away from everything else (the blue shift in the light spectrum), but since the light which they are studying is so ancient, how can they be certain that it is true?? Perhaps the so-called Big Crunch (the opposite of the Big Bang) may already be underway. It's fun to speculate, but how can we know anything for certain??

Answer 2

The basic problem of science is that it can't be sure about many things. At the big scale, nature follows different law than at the microlevel. For example, you can fit Newtons law of mechanics to the solar system but that breaks down at the atomic level where particles follow different rules. Science is trying to understand what rule to apply on what. The goal is to find a 'Unified theory' and it is still elusive to human beings.

Answer 3

It's a sure bet that "laws of physics" won't ever be universal, because we have no idea about the nature of physical laws of other universes in a larger multverse. However, we do can count on theorems in mathematics as being universal, since, for a given set of definitions and axioms, conclusions drawn from them are unique and deterministic.

Answer 4

we can't be sure everything we know is just a theory. and most these theories only work in situation similar to that which we live in.

Answer 5

That's the idea...we are always asking. Lasers, computers....these came from asking things. When we stop asking questions....that's called Religion!