Morning thoughts on truth, the uncertainty of sciencesteemCreated with Sketch.

in #science7 years ago

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PS: this article is unrevised and maybe too unorganized but I want to publish it now because "morning :3" I'll revise it or translate it later.

When it comes to rules, it's easy to prove one wrong, you only have to find one flaw, or one example that negates the rule, yet it's near impossible to prove with certainty that a one is true, in science this shows up clearly in what is called "the problem of induction"

Let's say we're playing billiards, you throw a ball against another ball, the first slows down passing some of its kinetic energy to the second ball, you try that few times and come up with some conclusions, like the kinetic energy passed depends on the angle the first ball hits the second, and the spin of the first and so on, cool!

Now you did your tests came up with some rules that allows you to expect the results to some point because you tried it 100, 1000 or even 1million times, but what makes you sure that if you did tried it for 1000001 try, both balls would disappear or a black hole will be made? And the answer is nothing, nobody can be 100% sure.

But one may say: Okay from an experimental view we can't, but on a practical level it's always the case we're using these principals to play billiards and we're all having fun, nothing so tricky or shady here. Yes I agree it's practical but let's remember the Newtonian principals of physics, they have been there for a while, we've been using them to make machines or launch rockets/bombs and it was working fine, but we also discovered later that they're not true, general relativity replaced it, Newton laws we're wrong, yet so close to the truth that the uncertainty was negligible unless we were dealing with extremely huge masses and distances or precision, or extremely small ones (like the atomic level)

So since we can never be sure why are we doing experiments why are we still doing science instead of philosophy to understand the world?
The answer is "because it works bitch!" Science is so efficient expecting results that allows us to use the laws of nature in our own good. Efficient enough to make our lives easier so far. And this efficiency is increasing the longer we test and apply, or as long as it matches logic or theoretical calculations these conditions increase the credibility of a theory.

And speaking of theory we used to make laws, but now scientists have learned to be humble and to admit that every rule is a theory that is waiting to be proven wrong next. The term law (like the law of gravity) is gone, we now call hypothesis on generalization of experiments, and theory after having them proven.

The reason I felt like writing this is to show those who claim ultimate rightness and legitimacy, on their political/social/religious views taking science as a personal point of view that they can agree or disagree with because science is always changing -despite their very limited knowledge- That they're way too far way too small in front of the gigantic unstoppable power and credibility of science, even though science has and will never make it to find one ultimate truth.
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