• Question: Do you believe everything in the history of science is true?

    Asked by nessy123 to Adam, Joanna, Louise S, Marcus on 21 Nov 2012.
    • Photo: Marcus Wilson

      Marcus Wilson answered on 21 Nov 2012:

      I think like all history its open to interpretation. and certainly most of the things scientitst used to think is wrong.
      I think we often overlook other cultures contribution to science, we in europe seemed really behind the times compared to those in asia and the middle east. They developed maths and basic analytical thought that allowed huge advances in science.

    • Photo: Joanna Giles

      Joanna Giles answered on 21 Nov 2012:

      I don’t believe everything in history is true, and I don’t believe everything in science is true. I’m also then unsure about everything in the history of science too.

      It’s really hard because sometimes great scientific discoveries take an awful lot of background work, and then someone (very clever) comes along and does the one experiment that ties together all the background work and gets all the credit. For example, the structure of DNA was shown about 60 years ago by a duo of scientists – Watson and Crick. But then a scientist called Rosalind Franklin actually did a lot of work leading up to this and is often forgotten about. Also, a lot of Darwin’s thoughts of evolution came from his teacher Lamrack during university (although Darwin did change these ideas that his mentor had).

      So, no, I don’t believe everything but I think I trust a lot of it 🙂

    • Photo: Adam Paige

      Adam Paige answered on 22 Nov 2012:

      Absolutely not. There are lots of false ideas, mistakes or just misunderstandings in developing scientific ideas. But the important thing about science is that you develop an idea and find a way to test it. For example quantum physics is a totally weird and crazy idea. But the model predicts things. If it is correct then certain things in the universe must behave how the model says it should. Scientists can then do an experiment to check that the universe really does behave that way, and they found it did. No matter how crazy the theory seemed at times, experimental observations agree with it. The same is true for evolution and the big bang – both of these models predict things that we have found to be true.

      If a scientific model is ever shown to predict things which we don’t see happening in reality then we can tell the model is wrong. Some of the old theories seemed right at the time (like Newton’s laws of motion) but a couple of centuries later some more detailed experiments examining planet’s orbits showed that there were some errors in Newton’s model. It was Einstein’s theory of relativity that explained why Newton’s model is not exactly right, and we now have an improved and much more reliable model of planetary motion.

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