Your Thoughts Exactly

People sometimes shudder when they hear the word ‘science’. To them, it means rote memorization: What happens when you add mix these two chemicals together? What happens in Prophase II? What was the name of Darwin’s ship? And I can understand that. There is no real science in these facts. In fact, I would call what most people learn in school is the history of science. Basically, what we know up to this point is what kids are learning in high school and college. There’s a good chance that a good percentage of what we know now is going to be proven false, or at least tweaked.

That’s why it leads people to say things like “Oh, evolution is just a theory.” And “oh, relativity is just a theory.” Well, yes. That’s the point, and the beauty of science. Things can be proven wrong, and things are always up for testing.

There’s a theory of gravity; I don’t think anyone would say “Gravity is just a theory.” Well, given all the overwhelming evidence for gravity, I think we can say that the existence of gravity is a fact. However, there are even now changes being made to the theory of gravity; modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND), dark matter, etc. That doesn’t invalidate what Newton discovered. It just shows us that our understanding isn’t complete, that we can do things a little better. All the evidence for evolution is in; it’s real. But that’s not to say we’ve gotten it 100% right. In fact, there are many holes in our understanding of evolution, which is why it’s sort of opened the door for creationists to say “well, you haven’t explained this, and this. Creationism does.”

People have criticized science nuts as being blindly faithful in science, just as some are blindly faithful in religion. The difference is, that if the base assumptions are false in science, nothing can make sense in the world at all, because it is all built on a foundation of facts that we have all been learning innately since birth. In fact, many scientists and sociologists believe that human sentience forms as toddlers test the hypothesis that their own mind is separate from their parents, mainly through a variety of very irritating methods to provoke responses. I believe that every person understands the process of hypothesis->test->conclusion, and for someone to say that this could be wrong would be for them to miss the point.

Let’s say that tomorrow, gravity stopped working. Would that mean that science was wrong? No, not necessarily. Our understandings reflect that things can change in science. New information is always appreciated, even if it is contrary to what we know so far. This new non-gravity world would be used as new information, and a new hypothesis would be reformed, one that took into account the gravity and the non-gravity. To say that the scientific method itself was incorrect would be to say that we were wrong in testing our hypotheses; it would be to say that there is no cause and effect in our universe.

That’s what is impressive about science: its ability to evolve and change, all the while keeping its core principles the same. Why? Because those core principles are impossible to deny: That there is cause and effect in the universe, and that by studying the effects, we can learn the causes. If you can conceive of a universe without cause and effect, please tell me all about it.

# posted by Stuart @ 2:47 AM