swanpinions

ordinarywish:

wearemagneton:

When people think that science is a fucking immutable fact.

Anyone who knows me knows that science is pretty much the most important thing in my life. Some folks have religion? I got science and Carl Sagan.

But the thing is, SCIENCE (as opposed to just science) doesn’t give you the right to fuck with other people’s identities just ‘cause SCIENCE doesn’t it back em up.

Science doesn’t mean that something is wrong just ‘cause we can’t prove it. It just means we don’t have proof of it YET. (Yeah I think that everything can be explained scientifically. I just don’t think we have the technology to explain it all and I don’t think we ever will.) Science isn’t about “WELP CANT EXPLAIN IT IT ISN’T REAL GO HOME NOW.” It’s about “Well we can’t explain it. Someone look into that.”

And here’s the thing. Science could “prove” a lot of shit we know isn’t true now. Science could prove the sun orbited the earth. It could prove that heat was particles. It could prove that the continents didn’t move. It said doctors didn’t need to wash their hands. It said that there were only four elements—water, air, earth, and fire.

Science can be fucked up. Science can be FUCKING WRONG.

Stop acting like it’s a goddamn immutable thing and shut the fuck up.
—Andy

But it’s more than this.  Science never ever proves anything.

Ever.

Science is interesting in things that are “falsifiable”; things than can be proven wrong.  There are other things which are non-falsifiable, and those are uninteresting to pure science, simply because there’s no way to prove them wrong.

Do gods exist?  What about invisible, silent, flying, purple elephants? We can prove either of those exist, but we can’t prove they don’t exist, and so science doesn’t say, “They don’t exist!”, it simply says, “Yeah, don’t care.”

This is very important for people to understand though.  We haven’t proved gravity, or optics, or genetics, or evolution.  It’s impossible, because, to take gravity as an example, the only way to truly prove gravity works is to test it on every permutation in the entire universe and somehow understand that you have the whole set finished!

So science doesn’t prove things “correct”, it attempts to prove things WRONG.

Someone comes up with an idea.  I think gravity pulls an object toward the earth! This person tests it, not to show they’re right, but trying to find an instance in which their hypothesis is wrong.

Eventually someone shows, actually, gravity seems to pull any two objects together!  More testing is done, etc…

The thing is, at no time has anything been proven correct. Even today, we haven’t “proved” that gravity works only one way, nor that mirrors and lenses work a particular way all the time. We simply know that they seem to work a particular way, given our observations, and this allows us to use them in a rather consistent way.

All of the natural sciences are like this, including mathematics, for what it’s worth.  There we have the added idea of these basic “rules” that we call the “Peano axioms”.  From those ideas, the number system can be described.

But, this is getting away from the point. Science isn’t about proving things right. You can’t do that. You can only show that something is wrong and adapt your ideas to include that new information.

All of this.