• Question: Is it possible for science to be wrong

    Asked by KaiF to Anna, James, Joe, Leonie, Olivia on 16 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Joe Spencer

      Joe Spencer answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      Hi KaiF.
      Of course science can be wrong. There’s loads of things that scientists theorize that people accept and then is proved wrong, or replaced by a better theory.
      Prime example, flat-earth. People used to think Earth was flat, then experimentally it was shown to be round.
      Scientists come up with a theory and then test the theory with experiments, if the theory is wrong it’s not their fault, it just means there’s something else we don’t understand.
      It’s what makes science exciting

    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      Hi KaiF,

      I agree with Joe, I would also add that in many ways it is vital for science to be wrong sometimes. A great example of this is in climate science. In the 1970s we became concerned that we were to enter a new ice age, but once research started on this fear, it became far more apparent we were facing a much greater danger, not from cooling but from warming. If scientists hadn’t been wrong initially, they might never have started looking at climate change and we would be decades behind in our understanding of it.

    • Photo: Anna Ashton

      Anna Ashton answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      Hi KaiF, good question!

      Yes it is, science is basically knowledge of a subject based on the evidence we have at the moment. It’s very possible to find new evidence that disagrees with this and reveals that the subject is more complicated than we first though. Science is a fast-moving, changing world because of this, which makes it exciting but also challenging. But it’s true that something that’s written in a textbook from 20years ago could now be known to be wrong!

    • Photo: Olivia Lynes

      Olivia Lynes answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      Definitely, that is what’s great about science, it’s always changing! The things we state as fact now are fact because we know they are right according to the information that we have now. That doesn’t mean we won’t get new information tomorrow that will completely change what we know.

      For example, when I was at school Pluto was still a planet, but today it’s just a big rock!

    • Photo: Leonie Oostwoud Wijdenes

      Leonie Oostwoud Wijdenes answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      As everyone already said, yes science can be wrong!

      For the type of research I do, we work with hypothesis about how we think stuff works. And we are only able to test whether these hypothesis are wrong! Until a hypothesis is not proven wrong, it’s very likely to be right, be we only know for sure once it is wrong.

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