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Comment by bcaxis | Hacker News Reader

How mach of our current understanding is just as wrong?

Probably all of it, if we extrapolate from the history of science. The theories we have now have replaced theories we now consoider wrong or less correct. No reason to think this will stop.

That's not actually true. We refine the theories, making them more accurate or extend them to cover a wider range of situations, but the theories usually hold out pretty well. Newton didn't address some things that Einstein did, but within their scope - which is most of human perceptual experience - they are accurate.

Lots of theories have been thrown out and replaced completely although no big ones recently. Will the explanation of dark matter require refinement or replacement - most are looking for some new particle or maybe some new wrinkle about gravity but maybe it will require a revolution.

> Lots of theories have been thrown out and replaced completely

Which ones? I don't know of settled science that has been found to be false, but maybe I just don't know.

Sometimes a new theory might eclipse another theory - cover all that ground and more, but that doesn't make the prior theory wrong in any way. My new, faster laptop doesn't mean the old one didn't work.

Phlogiston theory, formulated in 1667 - 1703 and being used 80-100 years later for its explanatory power, was a complete misconception of burning, heat and oxidation, is one example.

Phlogiston theory is post-Baconian. To me, Bacon was the first to articulate the method of thoughts that characterize good modern science: Observations, theory, prediction, experiments to verify the predictions. So I don't think saying we've thrown out pre-Baconian theories is germane to the conversation.

There is a Wikipedia page for Superseded theories in science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_theories_in_science

> Phlogiston theory, formulated in 1667 - 1703

If that's the best you have, we agree! :)

So what would make a theory wrong then?

I'm distinguishing between 1) the theory being correct, but not in newly discovered or broader circumstances. Newton didn't know about black holes, and 2) the theory being actually false - it makes false statements about the world.

It is not like relativistic effects only manifest around black holes or near-lightspeed travel. The effects are just more noticable.

By that logic geocentrism was also accurate.

"We don't know what we don't know", comes to mind as an answer. Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity explain a Whole Lot, but since they haven't yet been "meshed", there's more to come. The James Webb Space Telescope is providing data that is upending many things in cosmology. Dark Matter: As a phrase, it's not even clear that it's "matter". There's some phenomenon that causes stars to be attracted to one another independent of our current notion of mass.

Richard Feynman said "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts", and Carl Sagan said the "Science is a way of thinking more than it is a body of knowledge". Both of these point to the reality that our current understanding of the universe is riddled with errors and omissions. We do our best with the data we have, and try to transcend our own prejudices and history.

How much or our current understanding is "just as wrong?": Well, like most things, it's on a continuum, and to some extent a matter of opinion. Was Newtonian mechanics "just as wrong" as Ptolemy, when considering Relativity? I wouldn't say so, but maybe you would. Ptolemy's conception explained almost nothing and glossed over contradicting facts. Newton put mathematics around observations available to him, but named the reality that he had no understanding of how action-at-a-distance happened. "I make no hypothesis".

Depends on how you measure wrong, I don't think that Newtonian vs. Special Relativity Physics is the same amount of wrong as geocentric vs. heliocentric

Relativity doesn't agree with you. Relativity says you can use a frame centered on the Earth if you like. It makes your description of the motions of the Sun, Moon, and planets more complicated, which is why astronomers don't do it--why complicate things if you don't need to? But it's still a perfectly valid viewpoint as far as relativity is concerned.

In fact, astronomers today don't even use a "heliocentric" frame--they use a barycentric frame, i.e., the spatial origin is the barycenter of the solar system. The Sun is of course much closer to the barycenter than any other body, but it's not exactly at it.

Nothing.

At least not for any precise definition of "just as wrong" that would be useful.

There is, today, not a single terrestrial observation in contradiction to GR and QM. We have an incredibly good understanding of the fundamental nature of our reality.

Our understanding is so good that it takes decades of work by brilliant scientists and engineers, to build machines that could show even the slightest evidence of something else going on.

It's easy to overlook how stunning this situation is. It is utterly unprecedented in the history of science.

This does not mean that there are no deeper truths to discover, but Newtonian mechanics does correctly describe how the apple falls, even if it is not the final word.

The existence of singularities and dark matter suggest our current models could use some work.

Depending on what the future might bring, maybe all of it - or at least some aspect of everything. Since we base much, if not all of of our understanding on what we think we know: when those beliefs get thrown out then it will affect everything. This is admittedly not very useful in everyday life since we can't know beforehand exactly how earthshattering the new knowledge will be. Except, useful perhaps as a certain antidote to the potential suppressive damage done by those who are absolutely certain of the things we know now to be true for ever.

Example: what if it turned out that time itself had qualities no-one had suspected before? Time is one of those fundamental things in existence that may (or likely will) still reveal some previously unknown aspect. Which in turn would likely affect our perception of all things in existence.

Which means our "primitive" concept of time (and everything in it) would perhaps not be wrong, but incomplete. Or plainly wrong, for that matter.

> Example: what if it turned out that time itself had qualities no-one had suspected before? Time is one of those fundamental things in existence that may (or likely will) still reveal some previously unknown aspect. Which in turn would likely affect our perception of all things in existence.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful" [1]

The validity of Newtonian mechanics didn't change because we discovered relativity just like the equations of motion don't become invalid because there's friction. It's still useful, we're just more familiar with the boundary conditions where it breaks down. It's unlikely we'll ever throw it away because it is the simplest model with a lot of predictive value at low energies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong

> Since we base much, if not all of of our understanding on what we think we know: when those beliefs get thrown out then it will affect everything.

I don't think getting to the point of throwing anything out is necessary, if (some adequate subset of) humans could even get to the point of seriously wondering if our models and beliefs (across all domains, including those outside of science, particularly those which science sits on top of) contain zero fundamentally important flaws, I believe we would be well on the path to sorting the mess we've made out. Science and engineering are excellent examples of how capable humans are when they really set their minds on trying to understand something.

In physics? None of it. As Steven Weinberg remarked, if you have one of those T-shirts with Maxwell's Equations on it, you might have to worry about it going out of style, but not about it becoming false. Of course the remark about going out of style presupposes that it was ever in style to begin with, which is questionable, but doesn't affect the main point. :-)

What we do have in our current physics is a reasonably good understanding of the limitations of our theories: we know that none of them are theories of everything, they all have limited domains of validity, even if for some of them those domains are very wide. That is the key thing that systems like those of Aristotle and Newton did not have.

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