Thread: The Scientific Method - Why Science is Truth

Originally Posted by Taosaur

That's about as likely as The Rapture. If it were conceivable that there is a fixed sum of knowledge in the first place, I would invert those numbers: we are only beginning to grasp enough of physics, chemistry and biology (not to mention etc.) to generate serious quantities of data, and not until we improve our data analysis by a few orders of magnitude can we even begin to know how much we don't know.

You seem to think that science is about collecting data. Well sure, we haven't tracked the motion of every particle in the universe yet. But in terms of interactions, yes, we pretty much got it nailed down. For example, consider how much (little) has changed in the science (not engineering) of electronics, chemistry, physics, etc, over the past 100 years. Well, basically nothing. Maxwell's equations are correct in all but the most ridiculously extreme circumstances. Chemistry hasn't changed one iota in 70 years, and I already mentioned the Standard Model.

Let me ask you this: What, precisely, do you expect to change in our knowledge of the universe?

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

About once a century, people start to make this claim. Every time they do, a few short years later someone discovers something that blows the roof off of our current understanding of reality. We don't even know if our laws of reality hold true outside the context of our locale.

Actually, that only happened once, in the late 19th century. The scientific culture was different then.

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

The chances are that the potential for novel discovery is virtually infinite.

Novel discovery =/= radical transformation. I never said there wouldn't be discoveries, but they will be confined to ever smaller regions of the universe, in the sense of energy scales, space scales, or time scales. For example, if string theory is proved correct, that will just be a small addendum on the SM. It will not affect our lives in any way, probably ever.