{"id":26188,"date":"2014-09-15T11:24:13","date_gmt":"2014-09-15T15:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/?p=26188"},"modified":"2014-09-15T11:24:13","modified_gmt":"2014-09-15T15:24:13","slug":"science-vs-certainty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2014\/09\/science-vs-certainty.html","title":{"rendered":"Science vs. Certainty"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

The\u00a0New Republic<\/em> featured an article<\/a>\u00a0by theoretical physicist Carlo Rivelli,\u00a0about science and its relationship to certainty.\u00a0This is the best part, in my opinion:<\/p>\n

\n

What, then, are the aspects of doing science that I think are undervalued and should come up front? First, science is about constructing visions of the world, about rearranging our conceptual structure, about creating new concepts which were not there before, and even more, about changing, challenging, the\u00a0a priori<\/em>\u00a0that we have. It has nothing to do with the assembling of data and the ways of organizing the assembly of data. It has everything to do with the way we think, and with our mental vision of the world. Science is a process in which we keep exploring ways of thinking and keep changing our image of the world, our vision of the world, to find new visions that work a little bit better.<\/p>\n

In doing that, what we\u2019ve learned in the past is our main ingredient\u2014<\/span>especially the negative things we\u2019ve learned. If we\u2019ve learned that the Earth is not flat, there will be no theory in the future in which the Earth is flat. If we have learned that the Earth is not at the center of the universe, that\u2019s forever. We\u2019re not going to go back on this. If you\u2019ve learned that simultaneity is relative, with Einstein, we\u2019re not going back to absolute simultaneity, like many people think. Thus when an experiment measures neutrinos going faster than light, we should be suspicious and, of course, check to see whether there\u2019s something very deep that\u2019s happening. But it\u2019s absurd when everybody jumps and says, \u201cOK, Einstein was wrong,\u201d just because a little anomaly indicates this. It never works like that in science.<\/p>\n

The past knowledge is always with us, and it\u2019s our main ingredient for understanding. The theoretical ideas that are based on \u201cLet\u2019s imagine that this may happen, because why not?\u201d are not taking us anywhere.<\/p>\n

I seem to be saying two things that contradict each other. On the one hand, we trust our past knowledge, and on the other hand, we are always ready to modify, in depth, part of our conceptual structure of the world. There\u2019s no contradiction between the two; the idea of the contradiction comes from what I see as the deepest misunderstanding about science, which is the idea that science is about certainty.<\/p>\n

Science is not about certainty. Science is about finding the most reliable way of thinking at the present level of knowledge. Science is extremely reliable; it\u2019s not certain. In fact, not only is it not certain, but it\u2019s the lack of certainty that grounds it. Scientific ideas are credible not because they are sure but because they\u2019re the ones that have survived all the possible past critiques, and they\u2019re the most credible because they were put on the table for everybody\u2019s criticism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Click through to read the rest of the article<\/a>. HT Matt Young<\/a><\/p>\n

\"childlike<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0New Republic featured an article\u00a0by theoretical physicist Carlo Rivelli,\u00a0about science and its relationship to certainty.\u00a0This is the best part, in my opinion: What, then, are the aspects of doing science that I think are undervalued and should come up front? First, science is about constructing visions of the world, about rearranging our conceptual structure, about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":11914,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"yoast_head":"\nScience vs. Certainty<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The\u00a0New Republic featured an article\u00a0by theoretical physicist Carlo Rivelli,\u00a0about science and its relationship to certainty.\u00a0This is the best part, in my\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2014\/09\/science-vs-certainty.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Science vs. Certainty\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The\u00a0New Republic featured an article\u00a0by theoretical physicist Carlo Rivelli,\u00a0about science and its relationship to certainty.\u00a0This is the best part, in my\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2014\/09\/science-vs-certainty.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion Prof: The Blog of James F. 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