OkaY, my father-in-law graduated engineering school in the very early fifties. He had to go back to school to learn the latest goings on…that being the invention of transistors!!!..so, it happens to people, that change comes fast or slow, but there is a continual replacement of obsolete information, with new, proven scientific facts that were once theories.
My father-in-law who is 84 years old now, is still incredulous in that the use of slide rules is no longer taught.
Thanks…exactly what went on!!!
The Steady State cosmological theory was for some time
a serious competitor of the Big Bang. The central tenet
of Steady State is that the density of the Universe is
unchaging, observed expansion due to continuous creation
of new matter. (No, I don’t know how Steady State got
around certain possible issues relating to gravitation and
thermodynamics)
The 1964 discovery of the cosmic microwave background,
a phenomenon predicted by Big Bang but not Steady State,
resulted in the former’s becoming the standard model.
The term “Big Bang” was btw coined by Fred Hoyle, one of
Steady State’s inventors and foremost proponents. First use
is said to have occurred during a radio interview, and was
meant by Hoyle to be derisive.
No. I don’t know why it’s so hard to convince people of this. Science doesn’t prove facts; it doesn’t “prove” anything. Science is the business of making concise statements that can completely describe everything humans have seen and can predict what they will see.
That splits into two tasks - making the statements (coming up with theories) and looking at stuff (doing experiments). That’s not at all the same as proving facts, which is the domain of mathematics. For instance, the best that anyone can ever say while doing science is “given the history of observations of continental structure, geology, and zoology, my concise explanation of our observations is plate tectonics.” They can’t say “continental structure, geology, and zoology mean plate tectonics is true.”
And this isn’t a semantic problem. Theories describe the observations at hand. Ike Newton was totally justified in coming up with his laws of mechanics to explain motion. He turns out to be wrong for motion at incredible speeds, but observations of relativistic behavior weren’t in his toolkit. His theory was as right as could be - for his observations.
In the same sense, we can never say any of our theories are “true” because we (of course) can never observe everything. We never know if we are missing something really big that just happens to be quite rare but invalidates our theories.
I’m guessing what you’re asking is something that you don’t realize is very personal – what were you taught in school, that radically changed before you left. Plate tectonics is a good one of those, I’ll give you another – Kingdoms of life.
When I was in grammar school in the mid-70’s, we were introduced to the two kingdoms of life: animals and plants. And I was a smart little future scientist, so it was good. Animals and plants.
“And protists,” said my little sister a few years later.
“Uh … yeah … that’s what I meant to say, animals and plants and protists” even though I’d hadn’t heard it before
And then, in high school – fungi. Well of course. Obviously. Fungi, are not animals or plants. Although, you will still find books today that think mushrooms in the wood are just odd-colored plants. And bacteria have to be on their own. So we have 5 now.
Then in college only really two. Eukaryotes and Prokaryotes (the latter are bacteria and blue green algae, which aren’t all blue, or green or even algae, which are plants … er … protists. Those two are the superkingdoms, we still have the five er … four now, beneath them.
Excluding viruses, of course, since they’re not actually alive. Except …
But some stuff, for example my missive above, is all just what Richard P. Feynman would call, a “map of a cat.” Some names to be memorized, not rally an important bit of information that you need to develop functional theories. That’s the really purpose of science, and that task is never actually complete.
That’s the beauty of it!
Also, the statement that something is a “theory” doesn’t mean that what it deals with isn’t real. The theory may well be an explanation of HOW something works, not that it exists. Finding evidence that throws doubt on a particular theory of gravity does not mean that gravity isn’t real, just that there may be a better explanation.
When I was 8 years old-- in 1967-68-- I subscribed to Science News, and that’s when I remember the geophysical confirmation of plate tectonics was in the news. I remember it because I was so excited by the news I invited one of my friends over after school just to point out the article. My impression was that plate tectonics was pretty much a done deal from then on. It looks to me like your husband’s textbooks were 7 or 8 years out of date.
I took my intro geology course in the 1978-79 academic year, and my textbook treated plate tectonics as a well-established fact, but only recently so established. So it took, what, ~10 years for textbooks to get caught up? Has that rate been accelerating as scientific discoveries have accelerated in the past decades, or has it stayed linear?
Back in the day, the Earth was not only flat but the center of the Universe around which the Sun and stars rotated.
To profess anything else was blasphemous and claimants were found to be dead wrong, literally and figuratively speaking.
I’ve seen two different editions of the same biology texbook: in the older one the proton-pump theory of how the mitochondria in cells work was presented in a sidebar as a possible but not at all proven explanation; in the later one (1980’s ish) the theory was presented along with everything else as accepted fact.
(Yes, I’m using the scientific ‘only until enough evidence contradicts it’ meaning of ‘fact’. No need to rehash the semantics.)
I think that’s why there is so much trouble with climate change phenomena. Global warming gives the idea that we are all going to be living in a sauna bath, 24/7/365 and to some people, this name doesn’t correspond with what’s happening and therefore, can’t be accurate.
I hope that the fleshing out phase gives way to a little more enlightenment. I live in a state where our corpulent governor, says he “isn’t sold” on global warming. When politics fly in the face of science, it gets scary.
I don’t think that any “fleshing out” that may or may not be needed has anything to do with misconceptions about the theory. The models of global warming already predict differing effects on differing locations and times, not a uniform warming (but of course you already knew this.)
So science has already fleshed this out.
If you read Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Antarctica, there’s a conversation in it about the nature of science and the development of scientific theories. One of the main characters is having a conversation with some researchers who are in Antarctica to find evidence supporting the theory that the East Antarctic ice sheet is a recent development, rather than the older view that it’s old and stable, and they discuss the scientific controversy, and how scientific knowledge develops.
It’s too long to reproduce here, but is worth reading. If you get the chance, it’s on pages 170-180 of the paperback. It includes the great line, “Many scientists are wrong, perhaps most. They end up serving as devil’s advocates to the ones lucky enough to be right.”
I don’t think this was ever regarded as “fact” within the scientific community. AFAIK, by the time genetics was well enough understood, Darwinian evolution and common descent (or at least, the relationship between humans and other mammals) was already well established.
If I’m wrong, please correct me - I’m fascinated by the history of evolutionary theory.
I hope so too, but I’m not very sanguine about it. As Ludovic noted, scientists have already refined the anthropogenic-global-warming hypothesis far beyond the simplistic and inaccurate notion of “everything’s going to be steamy hot all the time”, but many people are just refusing to listen to anything more complicated than that.
And this sort of ignorance-defending reaction can persist for a long time. Consider the similarly simplistic and inaccurate notions about evolution that pervade popular understanding, such as “evolution says that humans evolved from monkeys” and “evolution says that life began totally by random chance”. Biologists have been trying for decades to explain the more complex science underlying these misconceptions, but some people just don’t want to listen.
Except for the two paragraphs I bolded, I would not call the items you listed “scientific.” They’re artifacts of pre-scientific scholarship.
I have a pretty distinct memory of learning, around 1975, about the idea that the continents seem to fit together, because they used to be together but broke apart.
I was in junior high school then, and our science teachers taught us this idea, but it was definitely presented as being a possibility that many were advocating but was not completely accepted yet. Looking back, I think they did it just about right.
They idea that a theory is just a “guess” that has no basis in fact is just wrong. Things that are pretty much accepted as fact in the ordinary sense of the word are still “theories” scientifically speaking, its not as if at some point a committee of scientists gets together and upgrades an idea from “theory” to “fact”. There are just some theories that have successfully used to predict future experimental measurements many times, and some that have not, they are both still theories. The idea that the world goes round the sun is called Copernican theory, and its still a theory.
That said plate tectonics was a rare example of genuinely kooky “left of field” idea that became mainstream (as opposed to simply a minority opinion that eventually won out against opposition from the established order). You can look at thisthread for a pretty in-depth discussion of all this.
When was the Earth last flat? And when was it considered blasphemous to claim otherwise?
Plate tectonics was a wild eyed, unsupported theory until the late 1950s when the first International Geophysical Year (July 1, 1957, to December 31, 1958) discovered the mid-Atlantic ridge. That was the smoking gun that pretty much settled the theory. Once tectonics looked like a real theory, evolutionary evidence started piling up. Species in remote parts of the world now had the means of moving from one continent to another.
Other recent “Can’t be true” theories include the idea that the dinosaurs were done in by a comet or astroid (T-Rex and the Crater of Doom is an excellent book on how what seemed to be an outlandish theory became main stream scientific thinking).
Talking about dinosaurs, when I was young, they were considered cold blooded, slow witted reptiles, but are now considered not only warm blooded, but in the same scientific classification as birds.
Even the theory of evolution by natural selection didn’t catch on immediately. Many scientists refused to embrace it because Darwin never came up with a good means of transmitting traits from one generation to the next, and how these traits would change. It wasn’t until Mendel’s work in Genetics (which were done at the time of Darwin) were rediscovered and applied to the theory of evolution by natural selection.
And, there was the long, long struggle getting scientists to accept the germ theory of disease. Many were still stuck on Miasma theory of disease way past Pasture and Snow’s evidence otherwise. (BTW, Ghost Map is another excellent account on how scientific facts will change.
Then, there’s the Big Bang theory that wasn’t fully accepted until the 1964 when Penzias and Wilson picked up the microwave background radiation while attempting to tune a radio receiver for Bell Labs.
Something more recent? How about genetic theory. We have way fewer genes than we originally imagined. And our genome is filled with junk (or is it?).
Prions as a disease vector was a big controversy even after Prusiner won the Nobel prize for his work in 1997.
In fact, one of the ways I use to separate out nonsense from science is to ask if it has been updated in the last few decades or so. Bach Flowers remedies still pretty much are based upon the original 38 flowers Edward Bach found in the country side of England. Homeopathic remedies have little changed in theory or substance despite the major changes in understanding of disease. Chiropractic medication has not developed since its founding in the 19th century.
In our age, even such scientific standards as evolution have evolved over the years, and the theory constantly changes. Science isn’t a doctrine, but a method. Doctrines never change, but scientific facts can.