Can we trust what science tells us BBC REEL

Adam how does science know anything anyway mean sometimes you know you read the news and it seems like scientists can't even figure out if like bacon is bad for your good for you it's what makes us think that science actually knows stuff mean one of the things that you'll hear people talk about sometimes is this idea called falsifiability so it's this idea that that an idea is scientific if it can be falsified if it can be proven wrong okay it's just wrong like that that's not true even the guy who came up with falsifiability as an idea for this his name was Karl Popper he didn't even really think that falsifiability was the end-all be-all but you hear lot of people lot of scientists especially sort of grabbing on to that and running with it so does that mean that like scientific ideas actually can't necessarily be falsified not quite it means that you can always do something to save it let me give you an example once upon time there was man named Isaac Newton right and he came up with the theory of universal gravitation he said that you know objects attract each other through this process called gravity he also you know came up with three laws of motion that help us figure out how objects interact with each other so once we had all of that we were able to do things like figure out how stuff in the solar system should move and one thing that happened after Newton died astronomers used telescopes and discovered something really new they discovered new planet in the solar system they discovered the planet that we now call Uranus but the problem was that Uranus wasn't moving the right way like they they watched it and they found that it really wasn't moving the way that Newton's laws of motion and universal gravitation said it shouldn't be moving so in theory they should have started chucking at the laws of universal gravitation at that point right you'd think that they would but that that isn't what happened instead they said there must be another thing out there that's tugging on Uranus and making it move you know in way that we didn't expect and so actually really smart French mathematician and astronomer or bein the Verbier don't think he was the first person to think that there was another planet out there but he actually calculated where it should be and he handed his calculations to some astronomers and said here look here think you're gonna find something interesting and they found Upton they found Neptune exactly where he said it was going to be and that was amazing so it turned out that actually Newton was right all along and it was just that there was something unexpected happening that we haven't seen coming exactly yeah but there was another sequel up okay was so mercury was also not moving the right way and love every the same guy who found Neptune he really sunk his teeth into this one and he said okay you know there's this work last time there's an on planet and it must be so close to the Sun that we can't see it it's like lost in the glare of the Sun this other planet were and must be really hot so we're gonna name it after the Roman god of foraging and blacksmiths we're gonna name it Vulcan which would light to be very very confusing that old Star Trek fans afterward yes indeed so they start hunting for Vulcan and you know the very thinks he sees it other people think they see it but it's not clear and their data is not very good and then Einstein came along and Einstein said no guys Newton was just wrong so Einstein says no gravity isn't quite how Newton said it was here's better theory of gravity theory of general relativity and lo the theory of general relativity completely accounted for the anomaly in Mercury's orbit so basically it sort of seems like sometimes we we keep the theory when it conflicts with experimental error and we just go and find some more experiments and then some but sometimes we go no we better had radically change the theory yeah and and there's no real way to tell what's gonna happen in advance the only thing that you can do is get more data and so then this leaves us sort of in pickle right like why are scientific facts better you know more reliable than facts from anywhere else why are they so much better one way of thinking about it which really like science runs on something called induction induction is this idea that that you learn things about the world by looking at the world and if things have happened before then they're very likely to happen again you know the Sun rose today Sun rose yesterday the Sun rose the day before so on and so forth so it's very likely that the Sun will also rise tomorrow and this is sort of the logical process at the heart of science of course that doesn't always work you know something that happened before might not be what happens in the future and in fact this is what it says on every single stock investors packet you know past performance is no guarantee of future results and in fact science tells us that there will come day when the Sun won't rise the Sun is going to die and it might swallow the earth and even if it doesn't swallow the earth that day will come when the Sun doesn't rise so so why should we have any faith in this stuff well this process of induction that we use for it's facts is the same process that we use to do literally everything in our everyday lives what do you do first thing in the morning when you wake up pretty go and have breakfast right why because I'm hungry right okay why do you think that having breakfast is gonna make you less hungry because every time get hungry eat something and normally that makes me feel that's not right the point is this process of induction is what you need to do literally everything in your life if you couldn't rely on it you just you'd be paralyzed by indecision because you wouldn't know anything what I'm saying is you don't have to have confidence that science and scientific results work but if you're gonna believe in anything at all then you should probably believe in the science too