That's the opposite of what science does. Nobody has ever explained this for me better than the physicist Richard Feynman.

"In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess it (audience laughter), no, don’t laugh, that’s really true. Then we compute the consequences of the guess, to see what, if this is right, if this law we guess is right, to see what it would imply and then we compare the computation results to nature, or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works.

If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is… If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

So when a scientist has an idea (or “guess”) the next step is to try and prove that idea wrong.

Let's say I thought that gravity and magnetism were the same thing.

To prove that wrong, I would need to find something that was affected by one but not the other. So I drop objects to the ground, gravity asserts itself on all of them. Then I test them with a powerful magnet. To my surprise, only some of the objects are drawn to the magnet. I now know that I was wrong, and that gravity and magnetism are different in some way. And this is how science proceeds.

All good science is falsifiable, and experiments are designed to try and prove things wrong.

As for “looking for what is there and that being good enough.” you are asking this question over the Internet using some sort of computer. Presumably you find these things useful. Quite likely you would be very upset if they were taken away from you. But both the Internet and the computer only exist because of centuries of scientific research and experiment.

The same is true of modern medicine and engineering. You are welcome to try living a pre-industrial lifestyle, but I suspect that you would not enjoy it.

Science is one of the most important drivers of progress, the means by which each generation tries to help the next by making their lives easier and giving them greater opportunities. Those who went before you did a lot of work to get you the things you have, and it certainly looks like you are taking advantage of them.

Scientists don’t see that because it is not true.

This is one of the many things laypeople get wrong about science. It’s also what makes it so laughable when conspiracy theorists say “do your research!”

A scientist does not try to prove that a hypothesis is right. She tries to prove that it is wrong.

A central tenet of science is falsifiability. A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable—that is, there must be a way to prove it wrong. (This is why ideas like creationism are not science—they are not falsifiable.)

You do everything in your power to falsify your hypothesis—to show that it is wrong. You do not look for evidence to support it; you look for evidence to refute it. The more it resists being falsified, the more you can trust that it describes reality…but that trust is always, always conditional.

The scientist isn’t having a hard time saying he doesn’t know something. For a scientist, the whole point is that there’s something they don’t know — that is the fundamental nature of science. The 30 minute discourse is on the minute piece of the puzzle that the scientist figured out as part of trying to study that thing that’s still an open question.

What that people don’t often appreciate is that science is a lot of work and a lot of details. Of course they don’t know the answer to the question; if they did, they’d move on to something else. Instead, they have some ideas about how one might go about answering the question; ideas that they can design experiments to test. Those experiments by themselves provide quite a lot of information about a very specific piece of the puzzle. The results will either: show that the experiment was not properly conceived, or provide some insight into the topic of study. A really successful experiment will also generate new questions, and clarify what parts you still don’t know but need to know to answer the bigger problem.

In a scientific talk, the first minute or so will present the larger problem. The next minute will carve off the smaller chunk that is the experiment. There will be a discussion of methods and presentation of results, and then the final 2–5 minutes will summarize the results in context and relate it back to the bigger picture (which remains a puzzle, but one with a few more piece filled in).

Not every experiment is earth-shattering or worthy of a Nobel prize…

Huh?

Gravity has always been part of the human existence. Scientists did not discover gravity; the apple did not fall on Newton's head and he suddenly realized, “Hey, gravity! How did we miss that?” Newton figured the rules for gravity and how it affected planetary orbits. Einstein refined the rules. He didn't discover gravity.

Sometimes scientists do discover things that we did not know existed. We knew earthquakes happened, but plate tectonics was not obvious. It was not something that we “always knew.”

So I don't think your question is particularly useful. It assumes something that doesn't have a basis in fact, and it smacks of anti-intellectualism.

We don’t prove anything. We just disprove alternative hypotheses, and go tentatively with the one most consistent with the evidence we have at the time. If there’s enough evidence, then we call it a theory. Even then, different scientists can favor different theories for the same thing, such as the origin of COVID-19.

As for “something simple,” nature is rarely if ever as simple as popular articles, TV shows, and Internet forums make them seem. Even as simple as the discovery I made for my doctoral dissertation—photosensory responses and sensory pigment in a larval blood fluke—it took me nearly two years of trial and error, near-tearful frustrations, complexities of experimental design to control for potentially interfering variables, designing and building my own apparatus, inconsistent data, inability one month to confirm results I thought I trusted the previous month—before I hit upon a solution. Once I reached that point, it took me about 6 weeks to get all the data that actually made it into the dissertation, and solve the problem. My dissertation data represent 6 weeks of research. They don’t tell the story of the 2 years that went before. At one point, I had nearly given up and decided to drop out of grad school and become a high-school biology teacher.

Ideas that seem simple—either in foresight as we contemplate whether and how to tackle a problem, or in hindsight as we summarize, distill, simplify, and report them in our publications—have many complicating issues that nonscientists don’t see.

I contend that of the three big branches of natural science, physics is the simplest because it deals with very elemental entities and variables: atoms and subatomic particles, quanta of energy, etc. (It’s quite likely also the most expensive of the three sciences—not everyone has their own particle accelerator or radiotelescope.) Physics seems hardest to many students because it’s so mathematical and it deals in abstract entities we can’t actually see with the eye, but only infer their existence and properties from their effects. (Have you ever seen an electron?)

Chemistry comes next in complexity, because it deals with more complex systems—molecules and reaction mechanisms and their energy transfers and fallible predictions about what we can make from them. Still very mathematical but difficult and daunting for many students. When undergraduates are required to get a year of science no matter what they’re majoring in, the vast majority run away from physics and chemistry and flock to biology.

Yet biology is the most complex of the three, because so many variables and chance elements enter into the phenomena we see. Because of these, we can seldom if ever be as certain of our interpretations of data as we can in the other sciences. We can’t control things as precisely. So often, when we publish, about the best we can say is tantamount to “there’s at least a 99.5% chance that this conclusion is true.” This is where statistical tests of significance comes in. If the best you can say is “There’s an 85% chance this is true,” you probably can’t even get that work published or past a dissertation committee because this isn’t a high enough level of confidence to think that anything real has been discovered. Pharmaceutical and medical sciences require the highest confidence levels of all because of the potential for human harm if we’re wrong. Companies can’t get a product to market unless there’s an extraordinarily low statistical uncertainty about its effectiveness and safety.

One might say (with some exceptions) that biology is the least conclusive of the three big sciences. That’s because biologists study higher-order levels of complexity, ranging from macromolecules, organelles, and cells up to entire populations, ecosystems, and deep time. The more complex one’s object of study is, the more components there are in its structure (in morphological problems); the more links there are in the chain of causation (in physiological problems); the more variables enter into the observed effects, including variables we haven’t yet discovered or controlled for (even variables we can’t control, like effects of geomagnetic fields and ocean currents); and the more the outcome is simply subject to chance events.

One of my favorite fields of biology is animal behavior, where there are so many fascinating stories to tell. When I read a report of an animal behavior in the journals or textbooks, or I see Sir David Attenborough present it so beautifully on film; or I’d tell my class of a certain behavioral study in 10 minutes of. lecture time—I must realize (and often told my students) that the “simple” and elegant little fact I just encountered or presented required over 20 years of field study not by just one researcher, but a whole team of professors and graduate students who sometimes had to camp out in tents in remote locations and bad weather for months at a time, year after year, to get that story.

That’s what it takes, sometimes, to discover something “so simple.”

Absolute certainty is problematic in science, because there’s always a chance that something was overlooked. That chance that something new will disprove something previously understood - however slim, remains theoretically possible.

Math can be proved. Science can only be understood or measured or outcomes predicted with very high confidence and even the word “understood” is a bit questionable. We don’t know exactly what a proton is. Scientists kind of know and have models for valence quarks and pion interactions and the strong force and how that makes a proton what it is, but this is modeling, not actual knowing . . . so if we don’t know what protons and neutrons are, and we can only make models that predict their behavior, and that’s what matter is mostly made up with, it’s not really fair to use the word “know” in for pretty much everything in science.

We’ve never seen an electron for example. They’re too small to see individually, but electricity can be used for many things and the electron model works. So a lot is understood and a lot is repeatable, but it’s a step too far to talk about science with absolute certainty.

Interestingly, things can be proved wrong with absolute certainty. “All clovers have 3 leaves” can be proved wrong with absolute certainty by finding a 4 leaf clover.

Does that make sense? I’m not sure I explained it as nicely as I could have.

That said, there are things that are so certain that we may as well say they are proven and absolute, such as - drop a rock and it will fall, or, Earth is orbiting the Sun. These things are for all practical purposes, absolutely certain, but the scientific approach still prefers to use terms like high confidence with any new bit of published research so with anything new, it’s the way to go.

People may rightly state that nothing is proven absolutely, which itself is an absolute creating an interesting paradox.

So the use of the term “proven” is somewhat vague and this causes confusion. We have varying levels of confidence in the things we “know.” Some things have earned a high level of confidence for most people, “it hurts when you stick your hand in the fire,” for example. Other things we may still regard as knowledge but with lesser confidence. For example, I am pretty sure that my car will start in the morning but not 100% certain.

If someone says, “science proves nothing,” they are wrong because science has provided high levels of confidence for numerous propositions (ideas, hypotheses, theories) across many knowledge domains. Science has also disproved (to a high level of confidence) many fallacious ideas. While neither the proofs nor the disproofs are absolute, many carry extremely high confidence levels. Science has proved to a very high level of confidence that explosives work. You can ask all those who have died from explosives whether or not that proof is sufficient.

So the statement “science proves nothing” can only be true if you mean “absolute proof.” But for all practical purposes, science proves and disproves a great deal. Science, at least attempts to discover new knowledge and increase the confidence we have in that knowledge.

Hello, NegativePandai !

It’s because nothing is as simple as it seems.

Adam Savage once said that the difference between science and fooling around is writing it down. He’s only partially right: the big difference is science and fooling around is that in science, you try to prove yourself wrong all the time, and you are getting somewhere only when you fail at proving yourself wrong.

That means that not only do scientists have to test that the evidence support the hypothesis, they also have to test whether the evidence is correct in itself, or whether the data is “contaminated” in any way (imprecise measurements, measuring something else, all possible variables taken into account, isolating the experiment so that only the relevant things are measured, etc). And they also have to test whether the evidence could support something else which contradicts the hypothesis. They also test it in different ways, so that they are sure that the experiment itself is not a fluke and that there are several independent lines of evidence. They also test the setup in a way which would not yield the desired outcome, the control, just to make sure that the premise behind the hypothesis isn’t flawed.

And because they are a suspicious bunch, they do it again and again so that they can report how confident they are in their conclusion (the confidence interval, CI or σ, lower-case Greek letter sigma). Then they have their colleagues look at it in a process called peer-review.

All that takes time.

RE: How can I know how sure scientists are about things?

The other answers have some pretty good suggestions like look for scientific consensus or talk to people knowledgeable in the field.

However to get reasonably good at separating fact from lies and wishful thinking you need to get yourself a bit of education. For a quickie course in getting real about scientific claims I will recommend a book called “Lies, Damned Lies, and Science: How to Sort Through the Noise Around Global Warming, the Latest Health Claims, and Other Scientific Controversies”, by Sherry Seethaler, ISBN-13: 978-0137155224, ISBN-10: 0137155220. The title pretty much says it all. It is written for the lay person who really doesn’t know much about science.

However there are some sources of bad information or outright lies that I just plain ignore.

• Most YouTube videos, especially ones from people you have never heard from or which have scary music or claim their content has been repressed by various governments, the world is coming to an end, the earth is flat, ancient knowledge, etc. A YouTube example: 25 Frightening Signs The END OF THE WORLD is Near God! What a waste of time.
• Comments about science from religious freaks. Science scares them. They have a lot invested in a belief system which can easily be refuted, so they work hard at saying science is just plain wrong. From one of the other answers to this question: “Are not scientists human: 1 fallen and 2 sin biased from Most 1 High 2 true God? The 1 - 2 punch.” Etc.
• Most of the news media, especially on-line news which doesn’t have anyone checking it. I have personally dealt with reporters and they often cannot even get the simplest things right; most reporters and editors have ZERO scientific education and they have to produce “stories” on a deadline. The media is also in it to make money. Anything breathless like “SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGH” is bound to be wrong or, at best, reporting preliminary results which have not been verified, but it gets peoples’ attention and that sells papers, ad views and clicks.
• Anything out of Hollywood. Even the better sci-fi stuff like “Interstellar” and “The Martian” have egregious scientific errors in them. And don’t get me started on “San Andreas”!
• Advertisements. Now THERE is money to be made. Fortunately there are a few laws against false advertising, but there is so much of it that the Feds can’t check it all. Note, too, that ads can control “the news”. Q: How much fossil fuel ad money would come to a TV network pushing nuclear power? A: None.
• Writers who make claims without pointing you at other references to check often don’t know what they are talking about or they are outright lying.
• Anyone who is going to make money if you “buy” their claims.

There are some sources I like. “Scientific American”, “Science News”, Wikipedia, even Quora. At least in Quora and Wikipedia there are people checking answers and even shutting off bad answers! I question and often refute answers in Quora on scientific topic from “Anonymous”.

I, personally, rely a lot on simple physics and algebra to separate fact from fiction. I also look for external references.

Anyway try reading that book from Sherry Seethaler. That will go a long way to getting you started in better “separating the wheat from the chaff”.

A slightly sharpened-up version of this question goes by some rather grandiose names. It’s been called “Meta-Induction”, and “Pessimistic Meta-Induction” and — my favourite — “Disastrous Historical Meta-Induction”.

Whatever you call it, it is an argument against scientific realism (that is, the thesis that the success of our best scientific theories is good evidence for the existence of the entities that they appeal to: photons, forces, space-time or whatever it may be).

This sharpened-up version points to the many examples we have of historical scientific theories that possessed all of the following features:

1. They accounted for all the observations of the phenomenon in question (empirical adequacy)
2. They were fully coherent with other well-tested theories of the time (coherence)
3. Scientists used these theories to put forward new and surprising predictions about the world, and these predictions were then tested by experiment and found to be correct (predictive power)

That is, these theories seemed to possess everything that our best current scientific theories possess. Including all those elements that we usually point to as evidence for the correctness of these theories.

And yet these past theories ultimately proved to be wrong. And not only wrong in detail: they actually failed to refer — they postulated huge families of entities that simply do not exist.

Which suggests (worryingly) is that empirical success of scientific theories cannot be good evidence for the reality of the entities mentioned within them. At least not in the naive way in which we usually think of evidence and reference. That is, for example, the amazing success of our “photon” based theory of light, is not actually good evidence for the existence of photons.

Let’s give a few examples before we move on:

• The effluvial theory of static electricity
• The phlogiston theory of chemistry
• The caloric theory of heat
• The theory of circular inertia
• The optical and electromagnetic ethers

Filling out just one of these, the caloric theory of heat (that heat is a liquid with certain properties) was laid out by Carnot in his “Relexions on the motive power of heat” that managed to lay the foundations for thermodynamics, led immediately to the correct solution of all relations between heat and motive power in all reversible processes. It led him to expressions for the maximum amount of motive power extractable from a temperature difference, showed a precise value for the heat absorbed in the isothermal expansion from one volume to another (it is predicted to be proportional to [math]R \log_{e} \frac{v_{1}}{v_{2}}[/math]). And a lot more. The emipirical evidence and predictive power of caloric is toweringly impressive. But caloric does not exist.

Each of the theories (and many others) fulfils all the conditions above. And yet they are plain wrong, in the sense that they are postulating entities (or physical laws) that just plain do not exist and nor does anything that resembles them. So, it’s worth noting that Isaac Asimov’s appeal to “approximate truth” that is repeated in several of the other answers has little power here. These theories are not just wrong in the sense that we now have refined view — like we know now that the world is not quite a sphere, for example. They are totally wrong.

It’s a pretty compelling, and pretty worrying argument.

In fact, it’s so compelling and worrying, it has led many people to change, or at least to refine their view of what scientific realism actually means.

The most popular move currently is to fall back from what is now referred to as “naive” scientific realism to something called “structural realism”.

This position starts from the observation that while — say — we have gone through a transition of believing that heat is a liquid to a theory where it is molecular motion, there is a core structure of the theories that was preserved. Most obviously, the fundamental equations of the old theory of Carnot remained the same (or approximately the same), but the quantities that he interpreted as referring to liquid flow were in fact referring to something different. And there is also a background of the logical structure of the theory that remains the same, even in the entities that this structure has as “nodes” are re-interpreted.

Similarly, one can think through how this happens with Newton’s corpuscular theory of light, that was then superseded by Young’s wave theory, and then in its turn succeeded by a quantum theory of photons. The structure of the old theory is re-interpreted, its success is explained, and its terms are now understood to refer to very different types of entities, but ultimately, there is continuity of the structure itself.

Therefore, structural realism holds that the thing to be realistic about is the structure of that theory: these are the elements that will (and must) be preserved in successor theories.

Of course, this quickly leads to many more questions. Is this essential“structural” element of the theory really and precisely separable from the rest of it? And can this separation be done “ahead of time”? That is, can we distinguish what we should be counting as “structure” ahead of knowing the successor theory? For if we cannot, it seems that this position does not help us much — since I don’t know what the successor theories to our current best ones are, what should I be realist about? And should this move be understood as epistemic (we can only know about structure) or ontic (there is only structure)?

Further, efforts to formalise these sorts of structural approaches quickly run into “Newman”-type objections, that relations between objects is not sufficient to refer: any collection of [math]n[/math] things can be regarded as having the same structure as any other collection of [math]n[/math] things. And science seems to have (a lot) more content than just counting stuff.

The arguments are long, and continue. But the current mainstream position is that the pessimistic argument can be defeated by being careful to understand what scientific realism is realistic about (whether this is in some more sophisticated form of scientific realism, or retreating wholesale in structuralism).

So, I don’t think anyone who has looked at the success of historical theories would defend the position that contemporary experts in science cannot be totally wrong — even in areas that are empirically very well-tested. What they might say is that there is strong evidence that our best current theories are based around elements that will not be totally overthrown. Their empirical success is strong evidence that these elements will be traceable in a well-recognised way to appear in all successor theories as scientific progress continues.

And, as such, we should listen to the best current experts in science to understand how our world is made up. But we should be clear what type of knowledge they are communicating: it is (typically) knowledge about the structure of a mathematical theory that is open to be interpreted in multiple ways. And new knowledge may (and probably will) lead us to interpret that theory and its structure in different ways in the future.

Science is not a collection of immutable facts. It is a method. The scientific method uses techniques that continually improve our understanding of the natural world. Scientists continually work to expand and confirm what we know. The information is useful because it is highly reliable. We can us it to guide our actions.

Some people are so uncomfortable with change that they can not even understand what science is, how it works, and why it’s important. They prefer information they get from supposedly unchanging sources, often supernatural ones, such as religious scriptures. They think things that don’t change are more believable than things that do.

I knew a man from an older generation who thought he was interested in studying science until Einstein put forth his theory of general relativity. The man had learned about the conservation of energy and the conservation of matter, which say that the form of energy may change, such as from electrical to sound (loudspeaker) or movement of water to electrical energy, but the total amount stays the same. The same goes for matter. When charcoal burns, the mass of the soot, ashes, and gasses equals the original mass of the charcoal and oxygen. Then Einstein came along and said you could turn matter into energy. The man felt betrayed and went into another line of work. He didn’t understand the scientific method and why it is the best way of ascertaining what knowledge is reliable.

Einstein’s theory of relativity changed our understanding of the relationship of matter and energy. He found that matter can changed into energy. Understanding that made it possible to figure out how to produce nuclear energy. The opposite also works, but so far on a tiny scale. Scientists who study quantum physics and astrophysics are always looking for ways to confirm or disprove Einstein’s theory of special relativity, E=mc2 (Energy “E” equals the amount you get when you multiply the mass “m” by the square of the constant called “c”, in this case the speed of light.) The are finding things that confirm it and its implications, but they are finding flaws in it, too. Both are equally important.

The important this is that the scientific method is continually improving how well we understand the natural world. The gold standard for an experiment is the randomized controlled trial (if it’s in medicine, it also needs to be double-blind).

This is of great practical importance. This is how we figure out how to make the amazing technological devices we use, and which treatments help cure us and keep us well. People who understand science don’t take ivermectin for Covid-19; they get vaccinated. Those who rejected science regarding the pandemic died in greater numbers than those who were guided by science.

People who can’t stand to be wrong are wrong more of the time than those with the curiosity &/or courage to look for faults and correct them. You can’t solve a problem you don’t know (or refuse to recognize) that you have. Scientists thrive on problems. Because of scientists our understanding of the world gets increasingly accurate and our decisions can have a more solid base. Who knows if the process will ever end?

A2A: I read a book once that contained interviews with several Nobel laureates. I'm sorry that I don't remember the author or title. I would like to find it again. A recurring theme was a feeling of inadequacy and fraudulence. They felt as if they had cheated, guilty that their understanding of their field was less than that of their colleagues or peers. They tended to underrate themselves and overrate their peers.

When I was little I thought the adults and older kids knew the answers to my questions. I was waiting for my vocabulary to grow sufficiently to allow me to ask the questions. What is this place? How did it get here? What am I?

Nobody knows anything.

Everybody knows a little bit. The more they know, the more they realize how much they don't know, even about their own field. Together, slowly, we seem to make progress, though every now and then we discover that we've all gone off on a tangent of misunderstanding and negative progress. Even Einstein had shortcomings of understanding. If he didn't "get it", then who does?

There are degrees of wrongness. History has some real doozies, like believing that the sun moved around the Earth, or that you could convert lead into gold via chemistry. Most of these whoppers existed before the emergence of the modern scientific method, with its insistence that theories conform to the data and that experiments must be reproducible.

Today when scientists are wrong it tends to be about the exact makeup of the atmosphere on Neptune, or obscure molecular processes inside human cells. But the point is that when we discover it, we fix it. Space probes have corrected zillions of tiny misconceptions about the other planets. For example, we now know that Saturn's rings are mostly empty space, and you can fly a spacecraft right through them. That sort of thing. Correcting errors and discovering new information is exactly what science is about.

So, no, scientists can certainly be wrong. But you better bring evidence to prove it, because evidence is the only thing that they listen to.

For several months, I was an administrator at a branch of the US NIH, specifically the National Institute on Aging. NIH provides money for biomedical research.

During that time, I occasionally heard administrators complain about how cautious many grant applications were. Scientists asking for money commonly proposed research that would advance a topic only slightly or maybe add another nail to the coffin of a nearly dead hypothesis

That happened because the scientists who look at research proposals are cautious. They don’t want the government spending money on something risky, anything having a big chance of failing.

That isn’t crazy. If you are exploring an unknown territory, going far without a compass might cause you to get lost and maybe eaten by a bear. The money spent on that expedition will have been wasted.

Staying near to your starting point is safe but won’t give you much new information.

The very best scientists have the intuition to find some balance between risk and safety. Some brave people who pursue risky ideas lose their jobs because those ideas didn’t pan out.

One of the key people behind the development of RNA vaccines, Kati Karikó, almost became unemployed on account of pursuing something risky. I outlined that story in another answer.

No, it makes me think that that is science, doing its job. The whole point of science is discovery and explanation. And while discoveries are increasingly about more and more exotic things, we still have a lot to learn about stuff that is right in front of us (or inside us), so every so often we will realise that we have to view something familiar in a new light.

As Isaac Asimov put it, the most exciting words in science are not “Eureka!” but “That’s funny…”

It’s when we notice something that doesn’t fit with our current understanding that we learn something new - and in this case, the insight that underlies reclassifying the interstitium as previously unrecognised organ may have genuinely huge and positive ramifications.

If it does turn out that that is how cancer cells spread, we may be able to devise a more effective mechanism to stop metastasis, and prevent thousands of painful deaths to cancer every year. That would be huge in terms of reducing human suffering (though it will also present new challenges to our economic and societal systems in terms of rebalancing the age profile of our populations).

The great scientific revolutions have come from seeing what is already there in a different light:

• Newton realised from the fall of an apple that there was a universal law of how things fall towards one another
• Darwin developed the theory of evolution by natural selection from decades of painstaking observation of differences between species
• Planck developed quantization while trying to explain why a heated black body does not emit an infinite amount of ultraviolet radiation
• Einstein developed his theories of relativity from the observations that the speed of light appeared to be constant and that a body in free fall would be indistinguishable in its own frame of reference from one at rest.
• Fleming identified penicillin from noticing that mould on an agar plate prevented bacteria from growing around it.

This interstitium discovery is not on the level of the first four, but it might in time rival penicillin for its public health impact.

There was nothing special about these observations, Everyone has seen things fall. The changes in speciation that Darwin saw were there for anyone with the time and patience to catalogue. The Black Body Problem and Michelson-Morley Experiement were well known puzzles for physicist. Penicillium mould was nothing new. The interstitium had been seen before - just not recognised for what it was.

What was new in each case was the insight about what it meant.

As to how much more we do not know, there is plenty more to be discovered, especially in fields outside the hard sciences like biology, physiology and psychology. Last year there were around 250,000 new doctorates issued worldwide (These countries have the most doctoral graduates) - and each one by definition involved original research.

Some of those will have been confirming or retesting existing findings. Many of them will have edged the boundaries of established theories a little further forward. But a handful will have sown the seeds of a revolution in our knowledge.

And that is a cause for excitement, rather than despair or mockery.

Because that is exactly what science exists to do.

This question is more a matter of semantics than "science". First, science is typically a matter of measurement, and you supply no count of the number of "scientists so confident", nor do you supply a count of the historical instances where they were "wrong so often". Yet you state it as if everyone would agree that you asked a neutral question, with no a priori bias.

In addition, the word "theory" is usually misused among non-scientists. All theories in science start out as a hypothesis, or a series of hypotheses. An idea, a conjecture, a guess, a thought....these are all "hypotheses". Only when a hypothesis has been tested repeatedly and independently, and those tests tested, does a hypothesis get elevated to a "Theory". And, even then, science tests and retests. The speed of light, 299,792,458 meters per second, has been tested dozens of times since the speed was first measured in the 1920s by A.A. Michelson.

A good example of the process would be the accepted Theory of Plate Tectonics in geology. The original hypothesis was posed by many (notably, Alfred Wegener and "Continental Drift"). But it was "only a hypothesis", to paraphrase Ronald Reagan. The idea of the continents "drifting" could not be supported by the evidence, but the hypothesis led to other hypotheses, until a Hypothesis of Plate Tectonics was proposed. Only after scientists reviewed and accepted the evidence, did the hypothesis become the Theory of Plate Tectonics.

We would need to determine what percentage of scientists are "confident" versus those that are "less confident" and then measure that against accepted theories that are given a high vote of confidence (e.g. The Theory of Gravity, Theory of Light) to see what the measurements say about the validity of your question.

Science is never involved in "proof". Science can only provide high degrees of confidence, or low degrees of confidence, and typically, scientists will measure what they are studying and pronounce their confidence as a statistical interval. Statistical confidence is something that less than 1% of the population can convey to one another intelligently. That is why Climate Science pronouncements, and AGW are so difficult for some people to accept, and for anyone to explain: statistics are difficult. Very difficult. The aforementioned "speed of light" is never "proven". Right now, the speed of light, given above, has a "measurement certainty of 4 parts per billion". What does that mean? Only statistics can tell you.

You have to know statistics, and know it well, to be a scientist. And in this modern age, statistical expertise should be a requirement for anyone running for public office. We have too many qualified people who know statistics, to ignore this basic requirement.

To ignore statistics, and go with a "gut feeling" is the worst possible way to explore and "know" the world. Lord Kelvin, (William Thomson) the famous British scientist, used measurement and statistics to design the first successful TransAtlantic telegraph system, correcting the flaws of the original failed attempt. But he went with his "gut feeling" when he pronounced that heavier-than-air flight was impossible, and would never happen. And so, a smart guy was wrong. He was wrong, because he did not use science to generate his claim.

Scientists worldwide write tens of thousands of papers every month. Most contain hypotheses. Many of these will be shown to be failed hypotheses by their peers. Some papers are strictly measurements, and the reporting of measurements. And those measurements will be challenged. Always. Statistically. Scientists who are wrong typically lead the way to what is right.

Every scientist who has ever written a scientific paper knows his ideas could be turned into "wrong ideas" by other scientists. And that is what they are "confident" about!

(Strictly - it’s their HYPOTHESES that are in question - it’s generally assumed that theories are proved, accepted science).

They do both - but it’s frequently easier to come up with an experiment that stands a good chance of DISPROVING a hypothesis than one that proves it.

Sometimes - it’s impossible to prove a hypothesis - even in principle.

Suppose I come up with a hypothesis that all Giraffes have irregular brown spots.

To conclusively prove my idea- you’d have to examine every single giraffe in the entire world and verify that is has spots…and even then, how would you know that you’ve examined absolutely EVERY SINGLE giraffe in the entire world? You could EASILY have missed one.

So this is a hypothesis that’s impossible to prove - someone would always argue that you somehow missed a giraffe someplace.

HOWEVER:

To disprove it conclusively…you only have to find one albino giraffe.

(Yeah, yeah, yeah - I know - it does have VERY feint spots…it’s just an example for chrissakes!)

BONUS - WAY OFF-TOPIC STUFF:

For a while, back around 1970 - my father got a really good job working for East African Airlines - in Nairobi - it took many months for my mom, my sister and me to get packed up and relocated there - and he got bored. So he decided to learn to fly light aircraft - and having done that - he wanted to qualify as a flight instructor.

To do that, you need to do a LOT of flying - and it’s expensive to rent a plane. So he volunteered to fly for the East African Flying Doctor service…so he got a LOT of flight time in. Anyway - one time he was flying along the Kenya/Uganda border and he saw an albino giraffe - and reported it to the Kenyan National Parks people. Since albino giraffe are EXTREMELY rare (like the one in the photo above is the only one) and this is the kind of thing that idiot big game hunters get excited about - he was totally sworn to secrecy.

Which makes disproving my hypothesis much harder!

These are my parents…is it possible to be less appropriately dressed than my mom?

Anyway - I do have some VERY shaky 8mm film of the white giraffe - I should probably get it digitized.

Congratulations, Quora Bot, you’ve stumbled onto the fact that for the majority of the sciences, proof doesn’t actually apply. A better hypothesis could always come along, or we could find an observation that doesn’t fit our current best hypothesis.

That’s why, for example, cosmology is about the hypotheses/theories that provide the best predictions, not anything that has been “proven” to be true. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that we can ignore the commonly accepted hypotheses because they aren’t “proven.” If you do that and can’t provide a hypothesis that at least provides predictions that come close to the accuracy of the accepted hypotheses, then you’re basically practicing wishful thinking rather than science.

They have been wrong and they will be wrong again.

Science isn’t math and it isn’t religion. It doesn’t prove the way math does, and it doesn’t believe the way religion does.

What science is is a collection of experimentally verifiable theories — called in the philosophy of science falsifiable hypotheses — about the way the world works. These hypotheses are constantly being formulated and tested against reality with controlled experiment and observation.

When a theory has been widely tested and found to make accurate predictions, it gains credence. But there is no guarantee that it will not be shown to be wrong or incomplete, and there are always scientists trying to do just that.

Newton’s Laws are a famous example of the latter. They make accurate predictions, but they are not completely accurate, and Einstein showed that Newton’s Laws are a special case of his Theory of Relativity, one which applies when gravitation is weak and objects move slowly relative to one another.

In practice, the scientific method of hypothesis tested by rigorous experiment produces ever more useful and informed theories, many of which are so successful that they are almost certainly describing the truth, or part of it. Because the method works so well, we understand far more about the way the world works than our ancestors did.

But a big part of what makes science work is the fact that all theories are provisional, that there are no sacred cows.

If science couldn’t be wrong, it wouldn’t be science.

Thanks for repeating the top incantation of the War on Science… the war against every single fact-using profession… is justified by proclaiming “experts can be wrong!” Oh, but here’s the stunning hypocrisy of this incantation. Science is the first “priesthood” in history whose central catechism - repeated by every student - is “I might be wrong.”

Scientists are the most COMPETITIVE humans our species ever created. They are constantly looking for each others’ mistakes. Hence, when the FAR-left and the ENTIRE-right attack science as monolithic or conformist, it is an utter lie.

Take this: “Why are people so sure the current experts in science can't be wrong, when history has shown they have been wrong many times before?”

Foolishness! It is science that taught us all how to criticize elites! Show us the “people” who are “so sure experts can’t be wrong”! You can’t name a single actual example! I dare you to name one example of such “people”!

This War against Science — and against every single other fact-using profession — now includes hatred of the FBI and military/intel officers, under the excuse-incantation calling them “deep-state.” Helping to destroy our American genius at fact-using argument, negotiation, practicality, and appreciation of actual actual facts… they are traitors against all of that.

Science is not a question of being wrong or right. Science is a method. It tests and retests in an effort to know what can be proven through repeated experiment. That means scientists are often wrong. They welcome errors because they learn from them. Science does not pretend to know some fixed truth that will endure forever. Science strives to know the most logical and provable models of the universe. All scientists readily admit their errors yet return to the field with new tests, new models in an effort to do better. Science is thus unlike most other human endeavors. Most of us conclude based on what we want to believe, then find evidence to support our beliefs. Science does the opposite.

Your question probably has to do with global warming. Or perhaps evolution. Could scientists be wrong? Possibly. But the overwhelming conclusion of the world’s scientists says that global warming is happening. It has been caused by human activities. And evolution is a fact. Perhaps someday these will be proven wrong. Scientists, unlike politicians and other ideologues, welcome the effort to do so. But if we don’t trust them with the planet, who do we trust? Oil companies? Politicians? You and me and our big fat cars?

People naturally tend to dismiss things they disagree with. If someone is scientifically uninformed and some scientifically proven fact inconveniences them, they’ll brush it off. Believe it or not, there are tons of people out there who know absolutely nothing about the scientific method. Some people actually think that the scientific community is a cabal of authoritarian dogmatists dictating what’s true and what isn’t. I know quite a lot of such people (even many who themselves have tech backgrounds).

Some people out there are just way too reluctant to face facts, and let their own personal desires get in the way of being rational and objective. That’s why they brush off facts as lies.