Could All Our Scientific Knowledge Come Tumbling Down Like A House Of Cards?
Scientific revolutions in science are real, and when they occur, they cause us to rethink many things — and perhaps even everything — that we'd previously assumed to be true. There are all sorts of foundational components to our knowledge that we rarely question, but perhaps we ought to. As far as revolutionary existential thoughts go, this is the ultimate question: how confident are we in the tower of science that we’ve built for ourselves?
The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is that we're very confident in the entire body of scientific knowledge that we've built up. That will remain true, of course, up to a very specific point: until a single robust result comes along that conflicts with it.
Science is both:
1. A body of knowledge that encompasses everything we’ve learned from observing, measuring, and experimenting on the Universe.
2. A process of constantly questioning our assumptions, trying to poke holes in our best understanding of reality, looking for logical loopholes and inconsistencies, and testing the limits of our knowledge in novel, fundamental ways.
We cannot cherry-pick the results or pieces of evidence that agree with our preferred conclusions; we need to confront our ideas with every piece of good data that exists. In order to do good science, we need to collect that data, put those pieces together into a self-consistent framework, and then continually challenge that framework in every way we can imagine.
At some point, you’re inevitably going to find something that doesn’t jibe with the prevailing wisdom. You’re going to find something that conflicts with what you expected. You’re going to get a result that contradicts your old, pre-existing theory. And when that happens — if you can verify the contradiction, if it holds up to scrutiny and shows itself to be really, really real — you’re going to get to do something wonderful: have a scientific revolution.
A scientific revolution, though, involves more than simply stating, “this old thing is wrong!” That's simply the very first step. It may be a necessary part of a revolution, but it's woefully insufficient on its own. We’ve got to go beyond simply noticing where and how our old idea fails us. In order to progress science forward, we have to find the critical flaw in our prior thinking, and revise it until we get it right.
This requires us to clear not just one, but three major hurdles in our efforts to improve our understanding of the Universe. There are three ingredients that go into a revolutionary scientific theory:
1. It has to reproduce all the successes of the previously existing theory.
2. It has to explain the new results that contradicted the old theory.
3. It needs to make new, testable predictions that have not been tested before, and that can either be confirmed and validated or refuted.
This is an incredibly tall order, and it happens only rarely. But when it does, the rewards are unlike anything else.
This notion extends even to our thoughts concerning the origin of the Universe itself.
Our leading theories of today aren't wrong, they're just incomplete. It's only by replacing them with something that succeeds where the present theory both works and doesn't work that science advances in any meaningful way.
