Can a scientific theory ever be absolutely proven?

Question

I personally cringe when people talk about scientific theories in the same way we talk about everyday theories.

I was under the impression a scientific theory is similar to a mathematical proof; however a friend of mine disagreed.

He said that you can never be absolutely certain and a scientific theory is still a theory. Just a very well substantiated one. After disagreeing and then looking into it, I think he's right. Even the Wikipedia definition says it's just very accurate but that there is no certainty. Just a closeness to potential certainty.

I then got thinking. Does this mean no matter how advanced we become, we will never become certain of the natural universe and the physics that drives it? Because there will always be something we don't know for certain?

Answer 1

Simple Answer: Nothing is guaranteed 100%. (In life or physics)

Now to the physics part of the question.

Soft-Answer:

Physics uses positivism and observational proof through the scientific process. No observation is 100% accurate there is uncertainty in all measurement but repetition gives less chance for arbitrary results.

Every theory and for that matter laws in physics are observational representations that best allow prediction of future experiments. Positivism can overcome theological and philosophical discrepancies such as what is the human perception of reality. Is real actually real type questions.

The scientific process is an ever evolving representation of acquired knowledge based on rigorous experimental data.

No theory is set in stone so to speak as new results allow for modification and fine tuning of scientific theory.

Answer 2

I basically agree with Argus, though I take a slightly different perspective.

Physicists try to explain the world by constructing mathematical models to approximate it. The phrase mathematical model can sound mysterious, but it just means an equation or equations that predict what's going to happen given some initial conditions. For example Newton's laws of motion are a mathematical model, as is general relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory and so on.

Every mathematical model has a domain in which is a good description of the world, and within that domain we regard the model as effectively exact. Outside that domain we know the model fails. For example Newton's laws describe the motion of ideal particles at speeds well below the speed of light. We know that for higher speeds we need a different model i.e. special relativity, but this fails for high mass/energy densities. To handle high mass/energy densities we need general relativity, and so on.

So we describe the world using a range of theories i.e. mathematical models, and we pick the one that we know works for the situation we are considering. In this sense our theories are always approximate.

However within the domain of our model we are completely certain the model works. If you're sitting at a desk in NASA working out how to send a spaceship to Pluto you can be absolutely confident that the trajectory you calculate will work. You would not be worrying about whether some new and unexplained physics might send your spaceship spiralling into the Sun.

Answer 3

You can never be certain of anything, except possibly mathematical theorems. This is the conclusion after long debates on epistemology. The ancient Greek skeptics were of the opinion that knowing the uncertainty of everything will give you peace of mind.

Answer 4

The philosopher David Hume pointed out induction can never be proven. Even if we have some proposed "law" describing everything we know so far, there is no guarantee the next observation will completely violate it. The world might not be what we think it is. There could be some malicious demon messing with our minds.

Answer 5

I'll try to answer this with three points about the scientific method and how "certain" we are of the truth in our theories. Keep in mind that scientists are overly dogmatic about pet theories but we should aspire to transparency about how wrong we might be and distrust everything until the evidence, be it scant or ample, is verified.

First, you can gather quite a lot of insight by listening to Richard Feynman's analogy between discovering the laws of nature and learning the rules of chess through observation of a fraction of the board. In particular, there's the part where he talks about a bishop changing it's colour despite ample observations of this never happening. His overall point is that we're never truly sure but we are always inadvertedly gathering evidence that the theory is right.

Secondly, you should read Isaac Asimov's essay The Relativity of Wrong. His point is that while a theory might be "wrong", sometimes they're very wrong ("the Earth is flat") but sometimes less wrong ("the Earth is a sphere"). In some cases, you can quanitify this. For a contemporary example, cosmologists have settled on $\lambda$CDM as the right model of the Universe. The point isn't that $\lambda$CDM is necessarily the whole story but that, if it isn't, then the evidence we've gathered already implies that the whole story can't be much different.

Finally, let's think back to the superluminal neutrino fanfare. It made big news, with the media painting a picture that made it look like the scientific community needed to revolutionize special relativity (SR). But a lot of scientists responded skeptically, even by offering to eat their shorts. So why the skepticism? Surely that flies against the scientific mantra of doubting authority?

Not quite. There were good reasons to doubt the result and anyone who dismissed those results should've defended their position. It was quickly pointed out that, if neutrinos travelled faster than light, we'd detect supernovae early. Also, I think Glashow and others pointed out that we'd see something like Cerenkov radiation from the neutrinos.

But more importantly, SR is, to me, a theory that is close to being "certain". It was and still is tried and tested extensively and it forms the basis of other theories that are themselves successful. So the odds of SR being "wrong" are outrageously small. We have inadvertedly tested it bazillions of times and it's worked perfectly. And the amount by which it can be wrong is very small. At the time, it could've been like the first time a pawn was queened into a bishop, but, to roll out the cliche, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.