Why I Like the Scientific Method
To my mind, science is a collection of explanations for how things are and work, together with a method for deciding what gets added to and removed from the collection. In school, we mostly learn about the current collection of explanations, but real science is all in the scientific method.
It was championed by philosophers like Francis Bacon, and essentially consists of using observations about the world to generate explanations using inference.
What tends to happen is that you have a hypothesis that things work in a certain way, and you create an experiment to test whether in fact they do work that way. All your successful experiments provide evidence that your hypothesis is correct. Your unsuccessful experiments provide evidence that your hypothesis is incorrect.
If there is evidence that your hypothsesis is correct and there is no compelling evidence that your hypothesis is incorrect then it will be included in the collection of explanations.
Nothing in the scientific canon is absolute. In general when a better hypothesis is found to be correct - one that covers the existing experiments, and explains some more things as well - the original explanation will usually be discarded. This has happened to lots of things, including ether, inheritance of acquired characteristics, and cholera is caused by bad smells.
Sometimes, explanations that have been superseded remain in the canon, because they are a useful approximation. Newton’s Laws of Gravity are an example of this. They have been superseded by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, but the calculations contained in Newton’s laws are easier (but still not always easy) to work with, and they are very good approximations - you need to be travelling very fast, for example, to notice that time isn’t constant.
What I especially like about the scientific world view is that it is inherently open to being wrong. In fact, I think it’s likely that everything we currently know to be true to be superseded in future by better explanations - ones that we haven’t thought of yet.
Embrace science, there’s a whole universe to be explained and we’ve only scratched the surface.
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