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Comment by Will_Parker | Hacker News Reader

Every point of knowledge has a degree of certainty or uncertainty around it. It certainly isn't a point that is taught well enough in education.

"The science is settled that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old" is a perfectly fair statement, for instance.

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Science never settles anything, it's why it's such a successful idea. "Current evidence says the world is about 13.8 billion years old" is the way I would word that. With your method, a later revision says science was wrong, when it just didn't have enough evidence.

It makes a difference whether you're speaking pragmatically or philosophically. Since we live in a practical universe, there are facts of science that are so well established that there is no reason to doubt them. And many facts that aren't as well established.

I know in this practical universe, Newton's laws of physics and Einstein's views of quantum physics were both at one point "facts" but later shown to be mere approximations and both of them worth being doubted. There's no point to having science if all we are going to do is assume everything that comes out of the process as the gospel.

> There's no point to having science if all we are going to do is assume everything that comes out of the process as the gospel.

As far as I can tell, nobody in this thread is even remotely suggesting that.

If I didn't think the parent I was replying to was suggesting exactly that, then I wouldn't have made the reply I did.

Using your pragmatic language provides almost no benefit, and it opens the door to people doubting science as it has been wrong before.

The known universe was 13.7 billion years old until a couple years ago. Either way, we're still talking +/- tens of millions of years with 68% confidence. At 95%, the interval is something closer to a billion years. Unless they've tightened it up since I last read about it when the 13.8 figure came out...

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