Ptolemy is likewise revered by astronomers as one of their founding fathers but they conveniently ignore the fact that in astrological circles he occupies a similar position due to his seminal work, the Tetrabiblos. Scientists can become very selective when dealing with alternatives to their world view.
I think you're talking about a different type of mistake than nitrogen is. You seem to be talking about accidental discoveries, or discoveries that were discovered while using mistaken techniques.
When Alexander Fleming discovered that penicillin fought bacteria, he was not mistaken at all. He was spot on- it did kill bacteria. Sure, its discovery may have been caused by a mistake, but what he learned about penicillin was correct, as far as I know.
Ah yes sorry I isolated the point up to cup's comment.
But I'm still sure that there are/will be times when great discoveries are proven to be mistakes. Barring practical ones like penicillin, there has been numerous 'discoveries' proven wrong much later; Newton's colour theory comes to mind, and of course the rather famous its-a-particle-no-a-wave ping pong.
What scientists cannot accept is that there are aspects of human life which are not observable or measurable. Science is good at measuring what is observable but many scientists then make that a foundation for denying, ridiculing or reducing what is not observable. Science then becomes, paradoxically, a religion.
Do you not also see a paradox in claiming to be able to observe the unobservable?
As others have mentioned in the thread, scientists didn't just wake up one day and decide to ignore everything supposedly "unobservable". Science was once intertwined with theology. Over the centuries, the methods we now call science produced results, while other supposed "ways of knowing" did not. Scientific knowledge converges over time, but religion diverges.
The unobservable category includes a lot more than religion. It may be that scientific knowledge converges more easily simply because it limits itself to what is observable or maybe, more accurately, what is mechanistic and observable. Take ghosts, for example. Do they exist? Let's conduct an experiment and take cameras to a supposedly haunted house. The ghosts in question decide to hide from the cameras. See, no ghosts. Told you so. The ghosts meanwhile laugh in background, taking a short break from scaring the inhabitants until the scientists leave.
I think a lot of people mistake ghost hunting TV shows for actual science. The SciFi/SyFy channel is a shadow of its former self.
It seems also that you have a very caricatured understanding of scientists.
First of all, a claim of the existence of ghosts requires some evidence that cannot be explained by other, simpler means. The principle of parsimony (AKA Occam's Razor) is important because it works. So for our ghosts, we would need residents' observations of sounds, movement, or other unexpected events. They could keep a log of the time and place of every ghostly occurrence, and demonstrate that no other explanation (thermal expansion causing creaking floorboards, drafts moving the curtains, slightly asymmetrical mounting causing pictures to tilt, blood flow through the retina causing spurious visual patterns in the dark, etc.) explains the observations.
Then you bring in the scientists, and all of the observations cease as if by magic. There are still physical explanations. The scientists' movement may be masking subtler sounds. Their presence may have made the house warmer, so the joints are tighter and creak less. The lights may be on more of the time, so visual patterns caused by misfiring neurons aren't seen.
But even if you rule out all possible simpler explanations, you still have a way of fixing the ghost problem -- just sell the house to a family of scientists, or install cameras and microphones to scare the ghosts away.
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Responding to the comment by clock_tower, that is the sort of platonic notion of "existence" that science avoids because it doesn't yield results. I'd say science doesn't really deal with "existence" in that sense, but "occurrence". So if you ask, "Does decadence occur?" The answer would quite obviously be yes. Using a more pragmatic definition of existence, you could say that any phenomenon you can define "exists", but you are likely to run into the problem of knowing which definition of a word someone is using.
Thus, I think you also may have a caricatured understanding of scientists, caused in part by the "fun-house mirror" effect from mechanically transliterating scientific jargon into a philosophical context.
Here's another question: does decadence exist? The physicist would say that it's a meaningless question; the historian -- or politician -- would be well advised not to listen.
(Barzun, in From Dawn to Decadence, defined a decadent period as one which has an objective which it wants to reach, which it could reach if it made the sort of changes which it has made in the past, and which it fails to reach nonetheless. I forget where I heard it, but there's an idea that there's social technology as well as physical -- and social technology is easier to lose.)
Science, by definition, makes no statements on way or another about what is unobservable. Some scientists may ridicule the concept, other scientists may revere that which they believe in, but science does not make claims about that entire field, and it wouldn't be improved if it did.
This is clearly incorrect since cosmology operates with the distinction between the observable and the unobservable universe. But of course there have to be a reason (based on models which can be verified in observation) to assume the existence of the unobservable.
