[phyzix5761]

> Faced with observations of early black holes and galaxies that weren’t expected to exist, scientists have come up with a wealth of new theories to explain them. Now they just need to figure out which ones are true.

This subtitle really bothers me. Science isn't about finding out what is true. Science is about finding out what is false and building models to explain the rest. We can never confidently say we know something to be true because that closes the door for future science to disprove our beliefs and that's exactly the purpose of science.

The best we can do is come up with increasingly more useful models accepting that in the end all models are wrong but different models are useful for different purposes.

[johngossman]

I think you are confusing the scientific process, in particular Popper's falsification principle, with science's purpose, which is to find the truth, or at least sort things into true and false. It's a bit like saying the purpose of programming is to have a bunch of unit tests.

[somenameforme]

He's saying that what is believed to be the truth at one point in time often ends up being false from another point in time. And this is inescapable since we never know as much as we think we do. In the late 19th century it was believed that physics was basically done, and all that remained was refinement to ever more decimal points. Then came along the early 20th century when quantum mechanics and relativity completely revolutionized the field and largely overturned stuff that had been believed to be true for centuries.

Science can do a decent job of disproving a hypothesis because even a single contradiction should be enough to suffice in good science, but it's far less efficient at proving anything true even if it seems to always be true. For instance mathematical relationship describing the gravitational attraction between large bodies seemed to always work, but it turns out it was merely a rough approximation that completely fails in various cases such as when one body has a particularly large gravitational pull, or when very high relative velocities are present. And even modern understanding is, at best, another rough approximation because we can already see endless examples in the cosmos of examples that defy current understanding and require further refinements in a direction that's currently unknown.

---

Basically at any point in history if you look at the bleeding edge science from a century before, it looks naive in many ways. In each era people always think they have finally moved beyond this, but we never have and it's entirely possible we never will since it's likely this universe has surprises awaiting us that we can't even yet imagine. Think about how utterly bizarre it is that time itself is a relative variable meaning with tech capable of reaching sufficiently high velocities you can literally travel into the future, relative to people at rest (such as all of Earth for example). It's nonsense, but it's completely real.

[phyzix5761]

Exactly

[lovelearning]

I agree with you.

"True" has a connotation of absoluteness and finality. But I doubt humanity can ever know what is "true" about the universe. We can only model its phenomena with better theories, where "better" is always a temporary badge conferred for its prediction power and degree of agreement with known observations. Until an even "better" theory is figured out.

"Now they just need to figure out which ones are _better_"

[icegreentea2]

I think it's very fair to say that the mechanics of science is about creating and selecting ever more predictive models that explain observations. So that's the how and what.

But what about the why? Why do we seek ever more predictive models? Obviously more predictive models allow us to just... do more and better things. And I think it's fair to say that that's enough justification in itself. But is there no substance behind the idea that we seek ever more predictive models because we believe it to be a (perhaps the only) systemic way towards "the truth"?

Put in other words, do you actually believe that there is no room for truth in science? Just concurrence and agreement with observation?

I guess I'm just nitpicking on your use of the phrase "science is about". I do agree that perhaps a better subtitle (without needing to reach for contortions in language) would be "which ones are more true".

[Tanath]

Hypotheses are made for a reason though. Science is still about finding what's true, and ruling out what's not is part of the process/method for doing so. Sometimes all the alternatives to the truth are ruled out and we know the truth. Scientific revolutions happen sometimes, but they still need to explain everything the old theories explained. The newer theories may still be wrong, but in different and hopefully fewer ways. It's important to keep the scope of what's been demonstrated/tested in mind to not be misled about what truths have been established. Newton's physics is still largely true within the scope of everyday experience, for example.

[idiotsecant]

Oh God do we really have to have the pedantic 5 page navel gazing thread about the philosophy of science that ultimately accomplishes nothing other than slightly increasing the entropy of the universe