Scientific Theories Never Die, Not Unless Scientists Choose To Let Them

[C C]

https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/sc...6cd37d3740

EXCERPT: When it comes to science, we like to think that we formulate hypotheses, test them, throw away the ones that fail to match, and continue testing the successful one until only the best ideas are left. But the truth is a lot muddier than that. The actual process of science involves tweaking your initial hypothesis over and over, trying to pull it in line with what we already know. It involves a leap-of-faith that when you formulate your theory correctly, the predictions it makes will be even more successful, across-the-board, than any other alternatives. And when things don’t work out, it doesn’t always necessitate abandoning your original hypothesis. In fact, most scientists don’t. In a very real way, scientific theories can never truly be killed. The only way they ever go away is if people stop working on them....

MORE: https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/sc...6cd37d3740

[Yazata]

When it comes to science, we like to think that we formulate hypotheses, test them, throw away the ones that fail to match, and continue testing the successful one until only the best ideas are left. But the truth is a lot muddier than that. The actual process of science involves tweaking your initial hypothesis over and over, trying to pull it in line with what we already know.

I think that's true.

In a very real way, scientific theories can never truly be killed. The only way they ever go away is if people stop working on them....

So when is that? Typically when there's an alternative theory that works a lot better. Perhaps it makes better predictions. Perhaps it's more congruent with other bits of scientific theory, serving to unify things.

Eventually people working on the old theories are no longer even included in the august category of 'scientist'. Think of astrologers or alchemists today.

An interesting thing to notice about the astrology example is that the goal and purpose of the entire enterprise changed.

The heavenly bodies were once conceived as being literally heavenly. It was believed that their configurations corresponded to the activities of and interrelationships among the gods. So the idea took hold that it was most auspicious to undertake various kinds of actions here on Earth when the heavenly bodies were in particular kinds of relationships with each other.

So the ancients proceeded to address this very scientifically, keeping precise records of what the heavenly bodies' positions were on particular dates. Presumably the goal was to discover correspondences between their positions and success in particular kinds of endeavors down here.

While they didn't really discover the kind of correspondences that they were looking for, they did discover something that they weren't looking for as they examined their collected astrological records. They discovered that the motions of the wandering heavenly bodies (what we call planets) were cyclical and that they could predict the positions of these bodies on any date past or future, using algebraic methods.

Then the Greeks gave those cycles a geometric interpretation and came up with their cosmological theories of the heavenly spheres.

Finally, along came Copernicus, Kepler and Newton in the early modern period and the focus shifted entirely away from astrological correspondences towards astronomical prediction of heavenly bodies positions not just two-dimensionally on the dome of the night sky, but 3-dimensionally in space.

So the entire set of questions and problems that the astrologers were originally addressing (heavenly correspondences as indicators of auspicious and dangerous times on Earth) was replaced by an entirely new set of problems (astrophysics).