[MD] Science and belief

[David M]

Hi MOQers

So does science hang on to ideas
when the evidence fails and the idea
makes no more sense? Well lets take one
of the most important and key metaphor-concepts
used in physics. The idea of waves such as electromagnetic
ones. This was taken up by science to explain oscilations
of certain readings, the analogy to water waves was
adopted. Waves, of course, according to all experience
require a medium to be expressed in such as water.
So the ether was proposed as the medium of electromagnetic
waves. Yet experiment eventually ruled out the ether
but the wave metaphor-concept stuck. And we keep
it to this day despite there being no physical description
of what is waving in electromagnetic phenomenon.

Science is a human imaginative construct, sure we test
it against experience, although the nature of this experience
has been interpreted by the concepts being taken up
as dreamt up propositions. Consequently science
is full of concepts, metaphors, analogies, abstractions,
that are tools for 'making things happen' as a recent
award winning book on science of that title says.

As science is a created/creative human project it is
full of ideas, assumptions, metaphors, etc, that in
no sense derive from the reality they are used to describe
and control. Scientists believe in them because they 
have proved to have their uses, they work, but they
cannot be confirmed by experiment. 

Does science approach truth? We can hope so.
We try to draw nature into out conceptual-linguistic
structures, we pose nature questions, we interpret
nature's answers when nature taps the table once 
and not twice, and we hope these answers are
reliable and not mis-interpreted.

David M