SCI-ART LAB

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 Q: Research is proving one's hypothesis or rewriting one's hypothesis based on the results of an experiment. Is it possible that all the scientific knowledge acquired might be proven false?

Krishna:  Is it possible all the scientific knowledge might be proven false?

No! 

Yes, genuine science invites falsification. But you cannot falsify everything in science. Why?

Science has two aspects (3):

One: The principles with which this universe came into existence and run by it.

Two: The process with which we study this universe.

If you take the first aspect into account, you will not find any place in our universe where scientific principles don't work and are not responsible for things existing and things happening. Without these principles this universe doesn't work and collapses and becomes non-existent. The very fact that it is working so well is evidence enough that science is working everywhere in this universe and running it wonderfully.

These scientific principles are fully established. Nobody can challenge and provide evidence contrary to that. Universal science is settled.

Right, if you come to the second aspect, i.e., the process with which we study and try to understand our universe, it is not science that is not working. It 's human mind's inadequacy to understand things in our 'scientific universe' responsible for that, not science.

When the 'results we get in a lab' tally with the universal science, then the facts get established in science. You cannot falsify these facts that tally with the universal principles.

You can use them in technology to help the world. Because they work wonderfully, you cannot say they are  wrong! Yes, you can improve the technology when you gather more knowledge, but that is not falsification - you change from one fact to another one which is 'more dependable' or 'more workable' or 'more efficient' or 'in different circumstances'.

Let us consider an example (1):

In the 17th century, Isaac Newton developed a set of equations that described the physical properties of the world around us. These equations were very successful, from a description of the flight of a cannonball, to the motion of the planets.

They also had a very appealing property: all observers, regardless of whether they are moving or not – i.e. regardless of which “inertial frame” they are in – are equivalent when it comes to their description of the world around them. So two individuals moving in different directions would see events unfold in the same way.

Even though formally these individuals would see things in a different way – one might say that things move from left to right, whereas the other might say they move from right to left – still the fundamental description of the unfolding events would remain the same, and the laws of physics derived by these individuals would have literally the same form.

But in the 19th century, people started noticing that not everything plays accordingly to this rule.

In 1907 Einstein realised that his theory was not complete. The principle of relativity was only applicable to observers moving with a constant velocity. It also did not fit with the Newtonian description of gravity.

  His thought experiments showed to him that gravity is not different from acceleration. So standing stationary on the Earth feels just the same as standing in a rocket ship accelerating at a constant 1G.

It also showed that the accelerated observer would observe that fundamental geometrical properties change. For example, that the number π (a mathematical constant) could no longer be defined as a ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.

So it was not just time and space that lost their absolute meaning, but Einstein realised that also geometry itself was not absolute and could be susceptible to physical conditions.

All this reasoning convinced Einstein that the geometry of the spacetime and the physical processes that take place in the spacetime, are related to each other and that one can affect the other.

It also led to a striking conclusion: what we perceive as gravity is just a consequence of the motion through the spacetime. The larger the curvature of the spacetime the stronger gravity is.

It took Einstein eight years to find the relation between the geometry of spacetime and physics.

The equations that he presented in 1915 not only led to a  different interpretation of events around us but also provided an explanation for some baffling or yet to be discovered phenomena: from the anomalous orbit of the planet Mercury, through the bending of light by the Sun’s gravity, to predicting the existence of black holes and expanding universe.

It was a bumpy road from Newtownian physics to special and then general relativity of Einstein.

There are several people who worked in between improving Newtonian Physics at each step. 

But Newtonian physics continues to be applied in every area of science and technology where force, motion, and gravitation must be reckoned with (2). It has not been proven false!

However, today's physicists, unlike Newton, know that his laws do not work in all circumstances. Einstein's work is just an improvement on Newton's work.The behaviours of objects traveling near the speed of light, or interacting on the size scale of subatomic particles, are not described accurately by Newtonian physics. Relativity theory and quantum physics are required in such non-Newtonian realms.

So scientific laws that run this universe cannot be falsified at all. And the ones we found and tallied with the universal principles also cannot be falsified, only improved depending on the situations. 

Only ones that can be falsified are the ones that were 'mistaken' to be correct because of human inadequacies.  

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