On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 11:55 AM, Alan Young <[email protected]> wrote: > The other end of this spectrum is that people are claiming we know so > much about the physical laws of the universe that any new discoveries > won't significantly change our understanding, so how can fit what we > "know" of the universe with what we "believe" about a god or otherwise > super advanced being capable of creating or manipulating, at a > minimum, a planet and populate it with life. > > I would like to point out that 100 years ago, we "knew" it was > impossible to get to other planets because the amount of energy > required to push through the ether that filled space was so large as > to be impossible, and even if we were somehow able to produce the > necessary amount of energy the friction would burn the ship to > cinders.
Yes, science is continually wrong about things, but the scope of its wrongness in a given domain tends to narrow over time. See this essay, where Isaac Asimov makes the point far more eloquently: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm Of course, it's often difficult to see as a layperson just exactly what the points of uncertainty in a given scientific domain are and what the confidence levels in 'fairly certain' parts are. We mostly see science filtered through journalism, which is not generally equipped to pass those kinds of subtleties on. Sometimes laypeople think scientists are more certain about things than they are, and often they think the science is less certain about a particular point than it actually is. It's hard to know without in-depth study of the particular domain, and in some cases there's a lot of background noise from people who don't really know the actual state of the science who are busy screaming at each other about details of the domain they're attached to based on how those details fit into their preexisting belief structure. --Levi /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
