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Asked by fireland to Indi, Jarv, John, Ken, Vicky on 18 Mar 2012.
Question: Do you think that anything can be 'proven'?
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John Prytherch answered on 18 Mar 2012:
A tricky question. In science, things are almost never ‘proven’, we can only use the evidence we collect to estimate how likely they are. So even with things that seem certain to us there is always a very slim chance we are wrong. This is just how science works.
Because of this you sometimes hear people say ‘It’s just a theory, scientists haven’t proved it’ when talking about things like Evolution or Global Warming. But of course, science will never ‘prove’ these things, but if they are 99.999 % likely, it seems sensible to believe in them.
If you want to be able to prove things, mathematics is the subject for you. It’s pretty much the only one where anything can be definitely proved.
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Jarvist Moore Frost answered on 19 Mar 2012:
Even in mathematics, where they do have genuine proof, these proofs still rely on fundamental beliefs that can’t be proven (called axioms), which are believed to be true, but which can’t themselves be proven.
In science, instead we go back to reality. As you gather evidence you develop a theory for how you think these things work, you then use this theory to predict how other behaviour should be. If these predictions are demonstrated to be correct, you get more confidence that your theory correctly predicts nature.
Even scientific theories that have been shown to be wrong are often supplemented for particular cases. For instance, Newtonian physics makes miss predictions for objects travelling close to the speed of light, and was supplemented by special relativity for these cases.
However there are still some things in science that have such overwhelming amounts of evidence for them that it’s almost impossible to imagine that they will ever be demonstrated to be wrong. A good example of this is in physics is conservation of Energy. In every single system every studied this has been observed, and it’s so reliable that it’s a great test of when you’re developing a new theory. If your equations / experiment violate the conservation of Energy, you have almost certainly done something wrong!
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Vicky Young answered on 20 Mar 2012:
Hey Fireland
You have all the philosophy questions! I think Jarvis and John have got this one down. I would agree that you can’t essentially ‘prove’ anything. I think its really important to raise these questions but I also think that we should still be doing research even though there is still fundamental questions like this. Although we can’t really prove anything we have still made great advances in medical science, saving billions of lives and we have still managed to travel to the moon and back. That’s pretty awesome developments in a short space of time!
Comments
John commented on :
Nice answer Jarvist!