[hugh3]

You do realize that proving "Einstein was wrong" is a favourite activity of the many physics cranks who hang around sending letters to physics departments year in year out?

And that of all the thousands of folks who have claimed to have a "proof" that relativity is wrong, the they break down as about seventy percent simple misconceptions and thirty percent complete nonsense, with the remainder being zero?

At the time, I would engage the other members of the lab in an ongoing debate about Einstein, where I'd take the position that Einstein was wrong (About anything, or everything, whatever the handy topic was.) I was, and am, an Einsteinian skeptic.

It's a good thing you left physics for programming, because it doesn't sound like you have a particularly strong commitment to scientific principles. To get a Nobel Prize it would be perfectly sufficient to show convincingly that Einstein was wrong about one thing [insert caveats here, obviously I don't mean trivial things]. If you believe Einstein was wrong about "anything and everything" then you're just committing the cardinal sin of believing things because you want them to be true, rather than because there's sufficiently convincing evidence that they're true.

[MarkPNeyer]

believing in something to be the truth, no matter how much 'convincing evidence' there is to support that conclusion, isn't really a scientific princple. skepticism, on the other hand, most certainly is.

science isn't about believing in anything to be the truth; it's about constructing analytical models that make accurate predictions while consistently exercising skepticism about the ability of any model to do so.

[hugh3]

Yes, the English language really lacks the vast suite of words we need in order to express our degrees of certainty about things. Words such as "know", "believe", "think" and "suspect" don't express these things properly, but we have to make do with what we have.

I don't think that "believe" is a particularly bad word for the relationship of a rational person to a fairly well established fact, though. I believe, for instance, that the Earth has an iron-nickel core. I fully acknowledge the possibility that it might not, and am fully ready to change that belief based on new evidence, but I think it's fairly well established and I am willing to act as if it were true.

[TheAmazingIdiot]

It is very apparent that Einstein was wrong, only because his theory does not account for quantum effects. But it works for human sized stuff and up to galactic supercluster motion.

It is also apparent that Quantun Chromodynamics is also wrong because it does not account for gravity. But it works for super small stuff including CPUs and subatomic theory.

But they both work tremendously well for their scope. Hence the seeking for a Theory of Everything, because each is incompatible with the other without that mystery glue. But they both are "Wrong" - because they themselves say their theories are incomplete.