re: #677 LudwigVanQuixote

A note by the way about the false meme that science is never closed. This is a gross oversimplification that grade school teachers pound into kids at an impressionable age, that never gets fully removed from teh general public perception.

It is true that science is always open to new data and willing to do away with cherished paradigms in the face of new evidence. SR did kill the luminiferous ether after all.

However, that does not mean that science never comes to a point, where it is essentially impossible for realistic new data to change the picture, given what we already know to be true. That does not mean that there are still not details to be worked out, however, the core theory will simply not go away, without having to re-account for absolutely everything we know in some new way that preserves all the old things that were demonstrated true and after a certain point there are so many things we know to be true that it becomes impossible to imagine anything changing the core theory at all realistically.

Does that seem shocking… Let me give some examples of closed science.

1. The Earth is not flat.

2. The Earth orbits the Sun.

3. Special Relativity.

4. Quantum Mechanics.

5. Thermodynamics

6. Evolution.

Isaac Asimov, may the Prime Integral preserve his memory, had a good essay on exactly that point: The Relativity of Wrong. It’s a good ten minute read.