Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave2042
"Results that have withstood the test of experiment will continue to remain valid, no matter how physical theory evolves."
This is, I think, one of the most important and poorly understood (by non-scientists) concepts in science, so it's nice to see it said so clearly.
I've had several weird conversations over the years (and seen writing along the same lines) with people who can't seem to see the difference between falsifiability (a structural feature of a theory that allows it to be tested against experiment) and falsification (an experiment actually contradicting a theory).
The worst was someone who had started from the observation that gravity as an attractive force is falsifiable and then concluded that it is entirely plausible that someone might do an experiment tomorrow which demonstrates it isn't. This wasn't a subtle point about dark energy or MOND or the like, or a theoretical point about epistemology. It was a straight-out insistence that an advance can simply invalidate all previous results.
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Hi Dave;
Yep .. I think I see your point .. I guess a lot would also depend on the way a Theory is expressed in the first place.
I guess the person you're referring to above might have been coming from the principle that it only takes one negative example to disprove a
Theory, and perhaps got things a little confused in the process ?
If one can't examine all examples of a phenomenon throughout all time and space, (ie: the problem of induction), then there's always the possibility that a properly constructed Theory can be disproven. The logical outcome might be to rework the Theory as a subset of something more generalised, where past evidence and new evidence co-exist ?
Cheers
PS: I forgot to add that the term 'disproven' is used here in the informal colloquial sense .. as 'proof' doesn't exist in the science process, in the first place.
