Reply to post: Re: re: Many, many phenomena in physics were predicted long before they could be detected

Re: re: Many, many phenomena in physics were predicted long before they could be detected

"Indeed, that is how science works. Nevertheless, before the proof is concrete it's sensible to take the theory with a pinch of salt."

Not quite. As I understand it, the only place concrete proof exists is in pure mathematics (i.e. proving a mathematical statement.) Scientific theories i.e. Einstein's theory of gravity, are impossible to absolutely prove, they just become more accepted as valid as more evidence is found to support them. A theory can be fully or partially disproved in an instant, however, if a prediction that is made as part of said theory is shown to be incorrect. All the science we 'know', is 'just a theory', but some of it has been around so long without being disproved that it is accepted as fact.

You're absolutely right that theories without evidence are taken with a pinch of salt. Peter Higgs (and his team) proposed the Higgs mechanism back in 1964, but didn't receive acceptance of his theory (and the Nobel prize that went with it) until 2013, after the Higgs boson had finally been detected in a two Large Hadron Collider experiments.

And other commentards seem to missing the point when talking about 'scientists getting their maths wrong so making things up.' Science and its theories evolve as our knowledge expands. Newtonian theory works absolutely fine here down on Earth when you're looking at falling apples, moving carriages and spheres dropped from towers. At the scale of the solar system, however, it starts to break down, its predictions in some cases not matching what we observe i.e. Mercury's orbit. Then along comes Einstein, and his description of gravity in the theory of general relativity offers a major refinement of Newtonian mechanics, and matches the motion we see in the solar system exactly.

Then as our view moves ever outwards to study the motion of distant spiral galaxies, we see that again, the currently accepted theory doesn't quite seem to fit what we observe. Either Einstein's theory of gravity is not quite correct, or there is more mass present than we can observe using our current technological capabilities, or possibly both. Given time, I imagine and hope a unified theory of gravity will emerge, and we'll understand gravity to be either a subsequence of the bending of space-time around mass, or the result of the interactions of the gravitons predicted by some quantum mechanics theories, and then we'll have a better understanding of whether the existence of dark matter is needed to explain galactic rotation.