Can Science Ever Be "Settled?"

StartsWithABang writes "From physics to biology, from health and medicine to environmental and climate science, you'll frequently hear claims that the science is settled. Meanwhile, those who disagree with the conclusions will clamor that science can never be 'settled,' and then the name-calling from 'alarmist' to 'denier' ensues. But can science legitimately ever be considered settled, and if so, what does that mean? We consider gravitation, evolution, the Big Bang, germ theory, and global warming in an effort to find out."

Comments

i interpret it to mean

[Anonymous Coward]

all attempts to disprove it have failed and until evidence can be presented to disprove or bring the results into question it is settled

it doesn't mean "this is doctrine never challenge it" it means challenge it knowing that it has been challenged before and the theory has held

Re: i interpret it to mean

[Anonymous Coward]

That isn't true. The term law was used in the past with the expectation that certain things were settled. The philosophical underpinnings of science have advanced since then and the term law is no longer used. Some older theories are still referred to as laws for historical purposes however they are theories. Theromes do exist but always with a defined set of starting axioms and therefore a theorome when applied to the physical world becomes a theory.

Re:i interpret it to mean

[fahrbot-bot]

A rare scientific law means it is settled. For most of them their are theories ...

The problem most people have is confusing Scientific Theory and pundit "theory" (mind the quotes). The two are not the same -- I even question Commander Data's overuse of the word theory in his many musings. I think he was sometimes a little slack in his application, but that's just a theory.

Re:i interpret it to mean

[riverat1]

No, the use of the term "law" in science is an old usage that doesn't get applied much any more. Theory and law essentially have the same meaning in science, that is something with lots of evidence to back it up and little evidence to reject it. What hasn't been relatively "settled" is science is generally called a hypothesis.

Re:i interpret it to mean

[ClickOnThis]

Laws have been settled and theories haven't.

This is a common misconception. It appears in several places in this thread. I suffered myself from this misconception before someone set me straight.

Roughly speaking, laws are quantitative whereas theories are conceptual. They both need experimental evidence to be considered "settled" in the sense of the current discussion, and both can be considered to have equal support in that sense. One is not "stronger" than the other.

For example, Newton's laws of motion express relations between quantities measured of objects in motion. Atomic theory provides a conceptual framework for explaining the behaviour of matter. Both are highly successful. The latter is in no way reduced by calling it a theory.

Feynman, in the first of his Lectures on Physics asked his reader to imagine that some cataclysmic event has wiped out all human knowledge, but that one single sentence could survive to be passed on to the next generation. What would he suggest that sentence be? The universe is made of atoms.

Re:i interpret it to mean

[ShanghaiBill]

The best description of this is Isaac Asimov's essay The Relativity of Wrong. He points out, that while science is often wrong, as time goes on, the degree of wrongness diminishes. For instance, Einstein showed that Newton's laws of motion were wrong, but Newton was less wrong than Aristotle.

Re:i interpret it to mean

[Kazoo the Clown]

Yes, I like to use this relative wrongness to illustrate "what's wrong" with pseudoscience. Science advances when someone finds something wrong with current theory. You learn from your mistakes. So I ask you, when was the last time someone found an error in the theory of Astrology? Of Creationism? Of anti-AGW? If mistakes AREN'T being found in these "sciences" they aren't progressing. Instead, if they're finding mistakes it's not in their own theories, but in the competing theories, like Creationism finding errors in Evolution or anti-AGW in AGW. The funny thing about that is, to the extent they are actually finding legitimate errors (and not just misinterpreting, misrepresenting or misunderstanding), they are actually contributing to making their "opponents" science better.

Re:i interpret it to mean

[cmdr_klarg]

Science is Faith's eternal enemy!

Science is not Faith's eternal enemy. Faith is Science's eternal enemy.

Ignorance is Science's eternal enemy. Faith in and of itself is not Science's enemy, but it is not unusual for Faith and Ignorance to go hand in hand.

Re:i interpret it to mean

[david_thornley]

Make a stupid comment, get downmodded, is more like it. The "politically correct dogma" Slashdot is working on is that highly intelligent people who have studied something all their professional lives are likely to be closer to being correct than people who just don't get thermodynamics.

More or less

[BenSchuarmer]

Newton's laws have been pretty much settled. Einstein found a way to get more precision under certain circumstances, but Newton is good enough most of the time.

Not a summary

[oldhack]

That's not a summary, that's a click bait.

I hope not

[Anonymous Coward]

For well over a thousand years Aristotle's work in the physical sciences (including zooology) was considered settled... until people started testing his theories

We called that period the "Enlightenment"

settled != True

[Immerman]

Absolutely. Settled doesn't mean True - science is unconcerned with Truth, perhaps even actively opposed to it. Because there is no theoretical way to distinguish between Truth and an extremely accurate and reliable misunderstanding. Accepting something as Truth denies the ability to challenge it - and those challenges are the very essence of science.

Settled means it has so thoroughly withstood all challenges that nobody much even bothers to challenge it anymore, and you'd better have some really solid new evidence to back any new challenge or expect to be laughed off the stage.

This is why the vast majority of anti-AGW positions are considered so ridiculous: The studies they're based on are almost universally either so laughably bad as to be obvious paid "science" propaganda, or are so badly misrepresented that the researchers themselves object to the claims being made by the pundits. Meanwhile the handful of potentially legitimate challenges are largely ignored by the media, presumably because they're either so esoteric they can't be expressed in sound bytes, or so outlandish that only other scientists could take them seriously. Unlike the propaganda being fed to the public, the larger climatology community generally treats those challenges with polite skepticism and constructive criticism because they are at least plausible, even if they need a *lot* more supporting evidence before they could be considered viable alternative explanations.

Re:question objectivity

[MillerHighLife21]

First class example is that evolutionary criticism (missing intermediate species or disputed claims of finding them, Darwin's doubled-down denial of genetics, etc) is completely forbidden in US schools.

They're not "completely forbidden", and they're certainly not forbidden in private schools. What is forbidden is using petty nitpicking of details, which are at best only marginally relevant to the validity of evolutionary theory, to advance religious doctrine, which is the only reason these issues are ever raised in the first place. If you want religion taught in public schools, move to Iran or some other country where superstition is mandated by law.

The idea that questions about evolution are only raised to advanced religious doctrine is a bit of a religious doctrine in and of itself. Literally the moment that anybody questions anything main stream the immediate response is that those people must be backwoods religious extremists. You see it EVERYWHERE. Somebody raises questions about monetary policy and excessive spending and people immediately go straight to conservative therefore religious. Anybody had the gall to suggest that it was possible for some people to be predisposed to have a negative reaction to something in a vaccine you'd immediately hear "right-wing-religious-nut-job" thrown into the conversation somewhere.

At some point public branding began happening that if you ever dare to discuss an issue, point out flaws, or raise dare I say "valid" discussion points that your question was invalid simply by invoking "right-wing-religious-nut-job" in the conversation.

The sheer fact that so many people immediately use that as a go-to rather that even thinking of defending any questions would seem to indicate that those people feel their own doctrine is being questioned, which makes the idea of those people calling others extremist nut jobs kind've ironic.

One of my all time favorite quotes:

"The test of first rate intelligence is to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - Dwight Whitney Morrow

There's a lot of people who believe themselves to be intelligent who cannot allow themselves to try to see things from another angle. Nobody holds a viewpoint strongly without having a good reason for doing so. If more people recognized that and tried to understand the other side you'd see a lot less vocal hostility.

Odds are very good that if you feel strongly about something there are a whole lot of times where you're right and a whole lot of times where you're also wrong.