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Originally Posted by Graham
But the point is that this is *science*.
If someone claims that "we cannot fly" or "we'll die if we travel over 100 mph" someone else can go out and do an experiment and either prove them right or wrong.
Then yet another person will go over the second person's results and check to see they didn't make any mistakes.
It was originally thought that the speed of light was inifinite, simply because those thinkers didn't have the ability to measure it. Then it was measured, corrected, measured again and it was stated that the speed of light was constant. Then someone else looked at the details and said "hang on, no, it's not constant, it can change in certain circumstances..."
Science constantly evolves and changes as we learn more, so, to quote Arthur C Clarke's personal "three laws:
1) "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
2) "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
3) "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
http://www.lsi.usp.br/~rbianchi/clarke/ACC.Laws.html
(Gregory Benford came up with a corollory to Clarke's third law: Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced!) |
very true, I think one of the 'problems' we have with physics, especially, is that a lot of the theory is just that. Einsteins work was initially based solely on mathematics, rather than experiment. When we were able to try to verify the theory, a lot of his conclusions turned out to be very close to the observations, but there were enough anomalies to beg further questions. This is currently being theorised in the various incarnations of string theory & supersymmetry, but again this remains, for now, a purely mathematical exercise. The scientists hope that the new particle accelerators due to come on-line soon e.g the one at CERN, will shed fresh light on the quest for 'the theory of everything'.
If some of this work bears fruit we may be looking at understanding antigravity & who knows what else - something to show the 'little green men', when they arrive.
