Michelle Nhung Le

Posted on: 6/2/2023

Since human prehistory, most people believed that the universe had a beginning. Then came the scientific discovery of the conservation of mass and energy in the scientific revolution, and science boldly proclaimed that an outdated ancient myth. That is, until Edwin Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe, and the scientific consensus embarrassingly returned to the idea of a cosmic beginning. Could it be that the science responsible for all this is just a fancy word for trial and error, and that he who places his trust in it is a fool? I believe otherwise, for all of its reliance on falsification by experiment and its struggle to distinguish one theory’s supremacy over another on any other grounds, science remains a useful guide to the world.

The reliance of science on trial and error is all but written int the scientific method itself. A hypothesis must make predictions about how the external, physical world behaves, and will not be accepted as theory until experiments are made, the world’s actual behaviour is observed, and the observations are found to agree with the predictions. Moreover, the predictions must be of such a nature that certain observations would conflict with them, falsifying the hypothesis. A negative example is superstring “theory”,which for the elegance of its mathematical foundations will not be accepted as a scientific theory until the superstrings or their effects (which would not occur in their absence) can be observed. The many revolutions in science’s history seem to provide clear evidence that the above-described scientific method is how science really is and has been practiced. Scientific theories have been revised time and again in the light of observations which agreed with the new theory’s predictions better than the old ones. For example, Newtonian physics replaced Aristotelian physics in part because Galileo dropped two objects of equal mass from the leaning tower of Pisa and they took the same duration to fall to the ground, an observation consistent with Newtonian proportionality of gravitational force to mass but inconsistent with Aristotelian proportionality of mass to speed of falling. These scientific revolutions show that unlike the proofs of math, the theories which constitute scientific knowledge remain open to testing and subsequent falsification, or in other words, trial and error.

While the above highlights the role of trial and error in science, however, it fails to show that science is nothing more than trial and error. Indeed, if that were the case, why have numerous hypotheses been denied even consideration by most of the scientific community, despite being as testable and falsifiable as the established scientific theories they dispute? For instance, where evolution accounts for sediment layers as the product of prolonged deposition, creationism accounts for them as evidence of a global flood; where evolution accounts for differing carbon-14 levels in fossils as proof of their very varied age, creationism argues that the Earth’s magnetic field used to be stronger and thus deflect more of the radiation responsible for carbon-14, thus exaggerating the age range determined by carbon dating. It seems that in this and other cases of underdetermination, agreement with the other theories constituting the scientific paradigm of the day as well as an individual’s religious or other non- scientific beliefs decided between hypotheses, but not trial and error. It would thus seem unreasonable to say science is just trial and error.

Moreover, even if science were just a form of trial and error, its effectiveness at describing and predicting the physical world gives us great pragmatic justification for it as a form of knowledge. Newtonian physics may have turned out to be an “error” upon the birth of relativity, but it still tells us how projectiles will move with sufficient detail to send man to the moon and back. Thus the layman’s decision to trust in a potential scientific “error” is not foolish, but very useful for his daily life because he can know that the “error” is extremely close to the truth in terms of the predictions it makes. Life would be worse if we did away with clocks because they cannot tell time at the same rate due to the Earth’s rotation and relativistic effects.

Trial and error’s role in science is not total, and it helps science correspond to reality and be useful to us far more than its errors may hinder us.

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