[jdoliner]

This is wrong in a few levels. Much of modern technology is built on modern scientific findings but few modern scientific findings have technologies built on them. There are entire fields, such as social sciences, which couldn't really be said to have any technology based on them. More importantly though, technology working isn't the same as an experiment, fire worked as a technology well before we truly understood underlying physics.

[brianberns]

I agree that soft sciences are much more likely to be seriously flawed.

That said, working technology absolutely is experimental validation of the underlying science on which it is based (if any).

[jdoliner]

It's very tricky to pinpoint what "the underlying science is." For example my phone is a piece of technology, you could argue it provides experimental evidence for any number of scientific theories. However, the hallmark of an experiment is that it can fail and in so doing disprove your theory. Can my phone fail? It can certainly fail as a phone and most phones do eventually fail for some reason or another. Does that mean that the experiment has failed and the underlying scientific theories need to be thrown out? Probably not, because it's failing as a phone, not as an experiment. What failure means when you try to consider your phone as an experiment is very unclear to me and without a clear failure case that would invalidate the theory it's useless as an experiment.

[tbrownaw]

Transistors (semiconductors) work because of quantum mechanics. If it didn't work the way we expect, the CPU would be a useless piece of rock.

The GPS receiver only works properly because we understand and account for general relativity.

The radio relies on a lot of stuff related to information theory. Which might be science, depending on how you think of applied math.

The screen and battery are built on a lot of materials science, which I don't know much of anything about.

.

What failure means when you try to consider your phone as an experiment is very unclear to me

A phone is far to complex and intertwingled to be a proper experiment; if it works it proves a lot of things, but because of that if it doesn't work it doesn't disprove much of anything.

If the phone works, it says "all of these things are true", which is a lot of information.

If the phone doesn't work, it says "at least one of these things is not true", which is correspondingly less information.

Those things are tied together. Someone who knows more about statistics and information theory could probably explain how a lot better than I can.

[Lon7]

Orbits of planets were calculated long before General Relativity. I believe we put a man on the moon using newtonian physics. Many types of medicine is successful without us knowing exactly why.

Just because technology that is built on top of science works doesn't mean that it is 100% correct. It isn't that our theories are outright wrong, but they probably still are incomplete or are only approximations.

[njarboe]

"Orbits of planets were calculated long before General Relativity"

Interesting you would say that. They were calculated and the orbit of Mercury was not predicted correctly according to Newtonian Physics. Using Einstein's general relativity, the calculations matched observations.

[adrianN]

They matched the observation that were available at the time really well. Even pre-Gallilean models matched the observations of their time.

[zerocrates]

"It works" isn't necessarily a great barometer for truth even for direct applications of theories. Ptolemaic astronomical models actually worked pretty darn well, even though they were based on a geocentric universe.

[ianamartin]

Nah.

If any phone ever works, it means that some of the underlying theories might be true. Any specific phone means nothing. And a phone that isn't working has absolutely nothing to do with any proof.

Implementations of objects that rely on theories are emphatically not proofs of them. And failed implementations of those objects are not disproof.

[Moocat87]

>fire worked as a technology well before we truly understood underlying physics.

Just following the analogy; what science was fire validating during that time? Just because something works doesn't mean it wasn't created by trial and error.