alt Hacker News> Faced with observations of early black holes and galaxies that weren’t expected to exist, scientists have come up with a wealth of new theories to explain them. Now they just need to figure out which ones are true.
This subtitle really bothers me. Science isn't about finding out what is true. Science is about finding out what is false and building models to explain the rest. We can never confidently say we know something to be true because that closes the door for future science to disprove our beliefs and that's exactly the purpose of science.
The best we can do is come up with increasingly more useful models accepting that in the end all models are wrong but different models are useful for different purposes.
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I agree with you.
"True" has a connotation of absoluteness and finality. But I doubt humanity can ever know what is "true" about the universe. We can only model its phenomena with better theories, where "better" is always a temporary badge conferred for its prediction power and degree of agreement with known observations. Until an even "better" theory is figured out.
"Now they just need to figure out which ones are _better_"
I think it's very fair to say that the mechanics of science is about creating and selecting ever more predictive models that explain observations. So that's the how and what.
But what about the why? Why do we seek ever more predictive models? Obviously more predictive models allow us to just... do more and better things. And I think it's fair to say that that's enough justification in itself. But is there no substance behind the idea that we seek ever more predictive models because we believe it to be a (perhaps the only) systemic way towards "the truth"?
Put in other words, do you actually believe that there is no room for truth in science? Just concurrence and agreement with observation?
I guess I'm just nitpicking on your use of the phrase "science is about". I do agree that perhaps a better subtitle (without needing to reach for contortions in language) would be "which ones are more true".
Hypotheses are made for a reason though. Science is still about finding what's true, and ruling out what's not is part of the process/method for doing so. Sometimes all the alternatives to the truth are ruled out and we know the truth. Scientific revolutions happen sometimes, but they still need to explain everything the old theories explained. The newer theories may still be wrong, but in different and hopefully fewer ways. It's important to keep the scope of what's been demonstrated/tested in mind to not be misled about what truths have been established. Newton's physics is still largely true within the scope of everyday experience, for example.
Oh God do we really have to have the pedantic 5 page navel gazing thread about the philosophy of science that ultimately accomplishes nothing other than slightly increasing the entropy of the universe
I think you are confusing the scientific process, in particular Popper's falsification principle, with science's purpose, which is to find the truth, or at least sort things into true and false. It's a bit like saying the purpose of programming is to have a bunch of unit tests.