How possible is it that science could be seriously wrong about some things?

Great Debates
1

Could any of the things that we now consider almost certainly true turn out to be false? I mean major paradigm-breaking revisions of currently accepted fact. Like, maybe the dinosaurs were big because gravity actually was lower back then. Or the Great Sphinx is really nearly 9,000 years old. Or black holes don’t really exist, there exist instead “gravistars”. Or the red shift is caused by something other than the expansion of space. (not that I believe or consider any of those examples likely).

I would suppose the answer is one of three things: Very low but finite possibility; virtually impossible given the facts we possess; or impossible to say- we can’t know what we don’t know.

2

Any particular one currently well-accepted fact, I would say is very likely to be true.

But the conjunction of every currently well-accepted fact? I’d say it’s very likely to be false (that is, that at least one of them is wrong). All those tiny, minuscule, infinitesimal possibilities for doubt add up, and there’s a lot of them to add up.

This is just what I’d say, though; my own particular perspective and inclinations in response to questions about my own levels of certainty. I don’t see any other really good way to assign probabilities in this case.

3

Could any of the things that we now consider almost certainly true turn out to be false? Yes, most of them.

4

Well, while prepping for a unit on Nutrition with my 5th/6th graders, I discovered that the map of human taste buds ain’t necessarily so. Both my colleagues and my students were shocked and outraged. You just don’t mess with basic concepts like that.

5

[QUOTE=Lumpy]
I would suppose the answer is one of three things: Very low but finite possibility; virtually impossible given the facts we possess; or impossible to say- we can’t know what we don’t know.
[/QUOTE]
I’d say it depends on what scientific fact you are talking about. The more data we have on something, for example, and the more complete and tested the theory describing it is, the less likely it is that we are that wrong about it.

To use an example from your OP, we could be seriously wrong about what we think are black holes; we know something exists, we can see something of what they do, but we can’t get a close look at them, and they involve forces higher than what we can play around with in a lab. They could be something that we’ve never theorized, because we’ve never had the opportunity to work with anything that would lead us to the ( hypothetical ) true nature of black holes.

On the other hand, we have much more knowledge of how gravity works in something like a solar system or planet. If gravity was lower in the past than it is now to the degree that would make much larger animals possible, the solar system and Earth would have changed in ways we understand and can predict. For example, there would have been changes in Earth’s orbit, the Sun’s internal fusion, and any number of other things that we can see haven’t happened. We have far more data, and far more understanding in this area, so it’s unlikely we could be that wrong.

6

Science could be wrong about everything. But it is the best we can do.

7

It’s better to think of science as what we know so far, as opposed to something engraved in stone.

Already, many theories which were once accepted by science have been proven to be false. The Earth-centered universe. “Miasmas” causing disease. Splitting of the atom. And so on. The concept of neuroplasticity was thought to be impossible until just a few years ago.

As for the most fundamental laws of science & physics…well, if gravity really works the way we think it does, it’s impossible to build an “anti-gravity” machine. But maybe, someday, science will discover a way around that. Perhaps the Laws of Thermodynamics (conservation of energy, etc.) don’t apply beyond our solar system (after all, nobody’s conducted scientific experiments outside the heliosphere.) Perhaps, extraterrestrial beings have already invented ways to defy the basic laws of science, and we just haven’t met them yet. Perhaps the recently discovered gaping hole in the universe is evidence of an alien experiment gone horribly wrong! :eek:

That’s the neat thing about science – it is always changing.

8

Our understanding of the basics has become sufficient that the chances are low to non-existent that anything really paradigm shifting is going to happen. Some of the past misconceptions that people like to bring up as examples of science being mistaken are not really indicative of what’s likely to happen in the future. There was a time we didn’t know anything much about the ocean or the geography of the earth and we had some very erroneous notions about it. Now we have filled in those gaps of knowledge and no new discovery about the earth’s geography is going to shift any paradigms. Just because people used to think the earth was a flat disc with a dome over it, doesn’t mean we’re ever going to find out now that it’s not really a pear shaped rock. Our knowledge now is much more thorough and much less speculative than it’s ever been in the past. The more real knowledge we aquire, the less likely we are to be to be totally wrong about anything.

9

[QUOTE=Lumpy]
I would suppose the answer is one of three things: Very low but finite possibility; virtually impossible given the facts we possess; or impossible to say- we can’t know what we don’t know.
[/QUOTE]
The first one is closest. Scince comes in two parts. One part is the facts, by which I mean what it is that happens. The second is a theory to account for what happens. Current theories explain what happens and they are all part of an over all system that is pretty consistent. However, out at the edges of each science there are puzzles and accounting for those puzzles might result in a radical shift in our theory. However the new theory must be consistent with all of the facts of the old theory and also account for the things that the old theory couldn’t.

10

Different answers for different sciences. E.g., I very much doubt any “paradigm-breaking” discoveries remain to be made in chemistry; our basic knowledge of how atoms and molecules interact is pretty much complete and research remains to be done only in the details. In physics, paradigm-breaking discoveries are always possible. In biology – well, until we discover and study some extraterrestrial life-forms we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible. And the social sciences, if they count as sciences, are still in their infancy (and might remain so forever).

11

[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
Now we have filled in those gaps of knowledge and no new discovery about the earth’s geography is going to shift any paradigms. Just because people used to think the earth was a flat disc with a dome over it, doesn’t mean we’re ever going to find out now that it’s not really a pear shaped rock.
[/QUOTE]

There really hasn’t been a time in modern, Western scientific history when people though the earth was flat, and I’m going back to the days of Socrates. It’s self-evident the earth is round.

However, it was just forty or fifty years ago that many, if not most earth scientists rejected the notion of continental drift. What we take as common knowledge now, many smart people were dramatically wrong about within our lifetimes.

It’s not at all out of the realm of possibility that there’s something like that right now that we still have not noticed. As others have already pointed out, our understanding of things like biology and cosmology still have a lot of potential gaps.

12

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Different answers for different sciences. E.g., I very much doubt any “paradigm-breaking” discoveries remain to be made in chemistry; our basic knowledge of how atoms and molecules interact is pretty much complete and research remains to be done only in the details. In physics, paradigm-breaking discoveries are always possible. In biology – well, until we discover and study some extraterrestrial life-forms we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible. And the social sciences, if they count as sciences, are still in their infancy (and might remain so forever).
[/QUOTE]

One caveat here - when you start talking about modern chemistry and deny that there are possbile paradigm changing discoveries to be made, then suggest that physics may well have some to be made - I think that’s something of a contradiction. A lot of the pure science of chemistry these days seems to be expansions into a better understanding of what’s really physical chemistry, which is about 90%, or more, physics. If there are paradigm shifting discoveries to be made in physics there will be effects felt in chemistry, as well.

I don’t believe that there’s anything that’s going to affect what I’d consider chemical engineering - or to put it another way, how the man on the street is going to view chemical reactions. But it’s likely, still, to change how chemists look at the science. For example it wasn’t until someone theorized, and using p-chem analysis proved it was possible, that anyone started looking for fullerenes, which seem to have great potential for a lot of applications.

Of course while paradigm shifts are real, they’re also only shifts - I can’t think of any that fundamentally threw out the older understandings, rather than reimaging the older understanding with new insights. I don’t think anyone will suggest that the Theory of Relativity wasn’t a paradigm shift, but we still teach Newtonian physics because for most purposes Newtonian physics are still valid. What Relativity did, IMNSHO, was to start to explain and illuminate some of the corner cases where Newtonian physics were having fits. Like the orbit of Mercury.

13

[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
But it’s likely, still, to change how chemists look at the science. For example it wasn’t until someone theorized, and using p-chem analysis proved it was possible, that anyone started looking for fullerenes, which seem to have great potential for a lot of applications.
[/QUOTE]
When I took chemistry neon, argon, etc. were “inert.” Then didn’t someone haul off and make a compound of xenon and flourine?

At any rate I think they are now referred to as “noble” gasses.

14

Asimov’s essay The Relativity of Wrong seems very apropos for the conversation.

15

[QUOTE=phouka]
Well, while prepping for a unit on Nutrition with my 5th/6th graders, I discovered that the map of human taste buds ain’t necessarily so. Both my colleagues and my students were shocked and outraged. You just don’t mess with basic concepts like that.
[/QUOTE]
That doesn’t really surprise me. It seemed strange to me as a kid that people claimed they tasted those certain kinds of tastes on those specific parts of the tongue.

16

[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
One caveat here - when you start talking about modern chemistry and deny that there are possbile paradigm changing discoveries to be made, then suggest that physics may well have some to be made - I think that’s something of a contradiction. A lot of the pure science of chemistry these days seems to be expansions into a better understanding of what’s really physical chemistry, which is about 90%, or more, physics. If there are paradigm shifting discoveries to be made in physics there will be effects felt in chemistry, as well.
[/QUOTE]

The areas of physics involved in physical chemistry (electromagnetics and the basic-level quantum mechanics that determines electrol orbitals) aren’t the ones that look like candidates for future paradigm shifts.

17

[QUOTE=RickJay]
It’s self-evident the earth is round.
[/quote]

I disagree. The Earth is intuitively flat.
It’s only after thinking about it, and putting many apparently disparate observations together, that the earth is obviously round.

Right, but new knowledge isn’t a paradigm shift, and most scientists expect to find surprising new observations in the future.
Plate tectonics didn’t mean throwing away everything we thought we knew about in geology, just the parts that were in any case wild speculation, and replacing them with a new, testable science.

Our standard model of Quantum Mechanics for instance, is known to be incomplete.

In answer to the OP, I think the chances of a major paradigm shift to anything that scientists consider to be “well established” is far lower than most people think.
For example, if you were to ask the average joe whether our theories on what supernovas are, and what causes them, could be overthrown, he might say “Sure, we thought the sun went around the earth once, right?”. But it turns out that our current theories on supernovas have helped us make many, surprisingly precise, predictions. Which is something the geocentric universe hypothesis never did.

18

For my money, the best thread ever spawned at the SD was on this very subject. Can’t find it now (I believe it occurred in 1999). A poster named Uncle Al asked whether physics could be considered terrifically wrong if just one of its principles was found to be untrue. A poster named J S Princeton took up the challenge, and the two of them went at it hammer and tongs for a good long time, with posts that often ran to dozens of pages and included hundreds of links. Frankly, that thread made the Plane on a Treadmill thread look like small potatoes. It all wound up revolving around the meaning of ‘chirality,’ a term I wasn’t familiar with and still don’t really get. Anybody remember that thread?

19

Like others have said, it depends on the science and it depends on your definition of “seriously” wrong.

Take the theory of evolution for instance. People confuse “theory” with “we’re not really certain it’s happened,” when what it really means is “we know damn well evolution has occurred and continues to occur, but we’re uncertain as to the exact changes that were made, the speed of those mutations, etc.”
While there is no true “missing link,” science reports are filled with constant discovery of new species and new groups within the timeline of those species and scientists must forever reinterpret the new data to match the old.
Could we find more evidence to disprove the “Out of Africa” concept? Sure thing. Is that proving that science was “seriously wrong” with regards to evolution? not really.

But let’s go to another field. Astronomy/physics and the concepts of Dark matter and Dark energy. After years of studying and billions upon billions of dollars put into catching or viewing or testing these two elusive substances…we have zilch. Nada. Nothing. Just more and more math that helps support the idea that dark matter/energy exist…but no real proof.
I think it’s entirely possible we’re wrong. I think it’s entirely possible that 20 years from now we’ll look back and go “Dark matter? Jesus, that ranks right up there with meat spawning maggots!” New discoveries of the universe could prove our current theories seriously wrong.

Or not. Maybe we’ll find something later this year. Who the heck knows?

20

[QUOTE=RickJay]
However, it was just forty or fifty years ago that many, if not most earth scientists rejected the notion of continental drift. What we take as common knowledge now, many smart people were dramatically wrong about within our lifetimes.

[/QUOTE]

I am glad you brought it up because it is a wonderful illustration of how science works, slowly feeling its way to the truth, developing and testing ideas, throwing out the ones that don’t work, etc.

I DO disagree a little with your comment that “many smart people were dramatically wrong about (continental drift) within our lifetimes.” It would be more accurate to say that most of them witheld belief until someone came up with sufficient evidence.

You will notice that you don’t hear the expression “continental drift” much any more. It is now generally termed “plate tectonics”.

If you want a really good explanation of this read the late, great Stephen Jay Gould’s essay.

You see, several decades ago, some scientists began to propose that the continents move around and have not always been in their present locations on Earth. This was greeted with a lot of skepticism, which is exactly how scientists should greet a new and startling hypothesis. Skepticism is the life-blood of science. It does not say “I refuse to believe you”. It says “Interesting idea, now what evidence do you have?”

The problem was that there was some evidence of continental drift, but none of it was really firm or convincing. The perfect fit between the west coast of Africa and the east coast of South America could be a coincidence.

The presence of tropical fossils in polar regions could be explained by the Earth having been warmer in its ancient past. In fact, there is now evidence that there have been periods when the Earth was tropical from pole to pole, no matter where the continents were.

But the number one, insurmountable objection was, “How can continents plow around like giant sleds; what mechanism would make them do that?”

Nobody had a good answer to that one.

Then somebody came up with the idea of PLATES!!! The Earth’s crust is made up of plates, some of which just happen to have continents and islands sticking up above the water. So the expression “continental drift” was dropped because the movement of the continants was now just a fringe detail to the main theory.

And the main theory, plate tectonics, suddenly not only made sense, but it also explained all sorts of things that had previously puzzled scientists. Such as why volcanoes and earthquakes tend to be concentrated in lines that run around the world. Suddenly scientists realized that this is where the plates are striking one another and one plate is going under the other. This explained why the major mountain ranges are where they are. It also explained the origin of structures like the mid-Atlantic ridge. That is where plates are spreading apart and magma comes up from the bottom of the sea to form new plate. Naturally, the mid-Atlantic ridge runs between Africa and South America. That is why they have that surprising fit. Because they used to be together and were ripped apart by plate tectonics.

So let’s not be too hard on the scientists who initially rejected continental drift. They were RIGHT to reject it in its inital form.