[maxnoe]

Science never proves a positive.

You can only disprove.

The only way to prove a positive if there is a finite number of possibilities and you have disproven all but one. But even then, someone could conceivably come up with an alternate description that preserves the current understanding but makes additional predictions or is a simpler model making the same.

As Feyman said: "We can never know if we are right, we can only be certain if we are wrong".

[simiones]

This is just sleight of hand. It's true that science can never be certain about anything, not to the same level as mathematics.

But otherwise, there is nothing special about positive or negative statements. You can express any positive statement as the negation of a negative statement, so to the extent that science can "disprove negatives", it can equivalently "prove positives".

[seanhunter]

I don't think that's true regardless of whether you or Feynman or anyone else says it.

For example:

Every continuous symmetry of action in a physical system with conservative forces has a corresponding conservation law. (Noether's Theorem)

There must be two antipodal points on Earth with exactly the same temperature and barometric pressure (as a result of the Borsuk-Ulam Theorem)

As far as I know these are absolutely proved positively because they are mathematical consequences of the properties of continuous functions etc. I'm not a scientist, but there are thousands of things like this where we are definitely absolutely certain we are right because of the possibility of a mathematical direct proof.

[n4r9]

You can prove Noether's Theorem in a mathematical sense, but you cannot conclusively prove that a specific physical force is conservative or that a specific physical symmetry of action is continuous.

Likewise, we assume at an operational level that temperature and barometric pressure are continuous functions (as assumed in Borsuk-Ulam), but it's not something you can conclusively prove aobut reality.

[seanhunter]

Sure but that doesn’t matter for my examples. The parent of my comment said “science never proves a positive” and I gave a couple of examples of proving implications. Proving “If A then certainly B” is definitively proving a positive whether or not we can prove A.

[n4r9]

I guess this comes down to what you mean by "science". Some would say that science is the process of testing hypotheses about reality. Mathematical facts exist in an abstract sense apart from reality, and so mathematics is not really science to those people.

There's an argument that you are still doing science if you construct a logical proof showing that "if the world is like X, then it will behave like Y". A lot of theoretical physics is like this, and people call that science. But I think there's truth to what OP is saying in that science does not conclusively positively prove things about reality.

[squeefers]

but you can use that exact logic to say the inverse; that nothing can be disproved, because you can never be sure youve disproved every alternative