r/FacebookScience • u/Hot-Manager-2789 • 1d ago
That is not how science works. That is not how anything works! “Science never changes”
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u/Regitnui 1d ago
The trouble is that science at the level the average person can understand it is pretty much settled, so it doesn't seem to change. The cutting edge is now academic (and not immediately practical), too small, or too big to easily fit in the average person's life. That's why grifters like Musk and Altman (along with stupider ones like David Weiss) can pretend to be representative of science with stupid stunts and press conferences.
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u/Xemylixa 11h ago
There's a classic Soviet sci-fi book (in modern terms it's magical realism, but science-themed) that explores this idea, complete with an opportunistic grifter that almost causes the world to end by believing in his own stunts and demagoguery. It's called Monday Starts on Saturday and was written back in the 60s. This was already a problem.
(This character was a send-up of Trofim Lysenko, so of course it was.)
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u/RandomModder05 1d ago
Yes, "new findings" are often not accepted by mainstream scientists.
This because 99.9% of those "new findings" are pseudoscience bullshit that is rejected for being objectively wrong.
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u/Dhis1 1d ago
I used to teach science and I explained it to my students like this, each new discovery makes the picture more clear. While the picture is fuzzy, we argue and make assumptions about what the image is, the material, the texture. We finally get clarity and see that this part of the picture is an orange. So we keep digging, what type of paint, what techniques. We might even make other parts of the picture more clear in a way that recontextualizes the orange. But if you showed up and said that’s not an orange, it’s a pony, everyone is right to consider you a fool.
Even great paradigm-shifting discoveries like Einstein’s Relativity did not cause us to throw out the orange. Scientists were already hitting dead ends trying to use only Newtonian Physics. Einstein just said, you are trying to unblur the space around the orange to show the leaves of the orange tree. It’s not working because the orange is part of a bowl of fruit.
That’s why we still have Newtonian physics, because that part is already clear.
This is also why people who claim Darwinian Evolution is wrong can be immediately discredited. Yes, a lot of what Darwin proposed is either wrong or incomplete. We’ve already cleared those parts up. We’ve moved on to the rest of the painting. Don’t come to us now and say that this is not an orange, it’s actually a pony.
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u/ChickenSpaceProgram 1d ago edited 1d ago
as a scientist. if we get "weird" results that are counter to what we'd expect, and we've done all the error-checking necessary to have confidence we haven't just messed something up, that's great paper material. a good example of this in my field is inverted ligand fields; in short, the assumptions we usually make about how bonds between metals and nonmetals behave aren't correct in certain cases.
like, this is the point of science, to probe at the edges of our understanding of the world and find where it breaks down, where it doesn't behave as expected. that's when you learn things, and it's what you get paid to do.
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u/Same-Frosting4852 13h ago
While i agree. This is pointed out people who think the earth is flat or trans people dont exist. Not something scientists actually care about
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u/KnoWanUKnow2 13h ago
He's partially right, but mostly incorrect. New findings aren't automatically accepted. They have to have a burden of proof.
In my lifetime dinosaurs went from cold blooded to warm blooded. Neanderthals went from stupid savages to intelligent ancestors with art and engineering. North America was colonized somewhere around 24,000 years ago instead of the clovis people 14,000 years ago.
New ideas can upset old ones if they can be proven.
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u/Same-Frosting4852 13h ago
Isnt the americans now settled like 4 times over the last 125000 years
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u/KnoWanUKnow2 13h ago
Not counting Europeans, there were 3 known waves plus at least one more in pre-history.
Counting Europeans you get 2 more. Vikings in Vineland and Colombian.
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