• Question: What would happen if everything a science as we k ow would be wrong?

    Asked by Alena to Daniel, Freya, James, Miranda, Usman on 18 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Usman Bashir

      Usman Bashir answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      I’d lose my job.

      lol to be serious, I think we would keep going. Long ago people thought the earth was flat, now we know it’s round. People were happy then, people are happy now too, only a little wiser.

      So I think, whatever science is today, works for us at the moment. And if proven wrong, things will still work for us but differently!

    • Photo: James Gilbert

      James Gilbert answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      Science is all about changing your opinion when new evidence appears. So if something came along that disproved everything we thought was right, it would be a shock, but a real scientist would say “ok, so this new idea is better” and carry on!

    • Photo: Freya Wilson

      Freya Wilson answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      So actually this happens on a smaller scale quite often- you think you know something, and you keep testing it and testing it until actually something isn’t what you expected so you have to change what you first thought.

      A good example would be when people thought the earth was flat. Everyone believed it, until the evidence indicated otherwise. IT takes a long time for common consensus to agree so change probably wouldn’t happen so quickly that I would lose my job!

    • Photo: Miranda Jackson

      Miranda Jackson answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      There have been theories that we have believed to be true and tested to the very limit of our capability. For example, Newton’s laws hold in just about every scenario we can create on Earth, and also all that we could observe in space. However, Einstein came up with relativity and it was proved that Newton’s laws (the equations describing force and motion) a simply do not work in certain situations (when we look at very fast-moving objects, or the orbit of Mercury, or starlight during a solar eclipse). However, when we take Einstein’s equations and apply them to the normal situations we find on Earth, they work out to Newton’s laws. Any new scientific theories that are made will need to also apply to the normal situations we can find on Earth, so even if all of scientific theory as we presently know it is “wrong” (which it probably is), it is still ok to apply it under “normal” conditions.

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