Philosophy of Science

Philosophy of science is a philosophy's branch developed mainly by Karl Popper. Nowadays Popper is considered one of the most important philosophers of the last century, specially in science. The theory he developed is called Falsacionism. Before speaking about this theory, however, it's necessary to define what science is.

A theory is considered a scientific one if it provides conclusions that can be checked and refuted by experiments. Otherwise this theory doesn't belong to science, but to philosophy.

A scientific law is established according to experience. Researchers obtain a lot of information from many experiments and then they extract a law. Later, they have to check this law with the experience. Therefore a scientific law is continuously to experiments. If a scientific theory explains an experiment correctly, we will be more confident about its truth, but we will never be absolutely confident about it. We will never know whether the next experiment will contradict our theory.

Newton's gravity theory, which explained the motion of planets, has been considered absolutely true for centuries, but Theory of Relativity showed that Newton's Theory was not absolutely true. It's only an aproximation, valid only when gravity is weak and velocity much slower than velocity of light

Even though the quantity of data from which a law is extracted is huge, we will never be able to infer a general statement in a logical way. For instance, if we observe that after A, B always occurs, it can't be infered that this fact has to occur always in this way. We think A is followed by B due to a belief instead of a logical connection between A and B. If a physical law explains the experiments rigorously, it doesn't mean that this physical law will also explain the experiments in the future. Therefore, we can only assure that a theory can be false, but we can never state that a theory is right. The theory that proposes this conclusion is called Falsacionism.

Aerial photo of the Tevatron at Fermilab. The main accelerator is the ring above; the one below is for preliminary acceleration, beam cooling and storage. Experiments in particle accelerators are always exactly explained by the Standard Model of particle physics. However nobody knows whether the next experiment will keep confirming the standard model

Consequently science can be proved neither by experience nor by logic. Hence, science isn't true, but more or less probable. The likelihood of a law depends on the number of experiments that support this law. Science is a process of search for better theories without end and the knowledge it provides is always provisional. We can't state that we know something with certainty, since its falseness is always possible. Hence, we have to understand the notion of truth as an approximation to the truth because we will never be able to know if we have reached the truth.