• webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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    10 hours ago

    The more i learn the more i realise most of science is this way.

    I was already adult when i realised “the big bang theory” is exactly what it implies. A possible theory and not at all a fact.

    • village604@adultswim.fan
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      9 hours ago

      You’re confusing scientific theory with scientific hypothesis.

      A hypothesis is an educated guess that doesn’t have facts backing it yet.

      A theory is a hypothesis that has undergone rigorous testing and has strong, repeatable evidence backing it.

      • podian@piefed.social
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        9 hours ago

        I believe a lot of the confusion results from forming conclusions based on what is presented in headlines, both in media and journals, instead of reading the usually much more modest full text.

        Shitty attention economy at work. Brain rot started a loooong time ago.

        • village604@adultswim.fan
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          8 hours ago

          A law or principal is a single proven statement while a theory is a collection of proven statements.

          Basically, a law is how things work while a theory is why things work.

        • athatet@lemmy.zip
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          9 hours ago

          I think it’s that Laws are proven to be true whereas Theories just have not yet been proven false.

          • village604@adultswim.fan
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            8 hours ago

            Not quite. Laws are a single proven statement and theories are a collection of laws used to explain why something is the way it is.

            The Big Bang Theory uses the laws of physics to justify it.

    • ImWaitingForRetcons@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      … that’s not how it works, though. In science, a theory is a proven hypothesis that can be used to make predictions and successfully does so. Just because we don’t know what happened in the very first fraction of an instant doesn’t mean the theory (that the universe was in a very hot, compact and dense state that rapidly expanded out and formed the universe as we know it today) isn’t correct, just that it’s incomplete.

      • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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        3 hours ago

        I did mix up the terminology and i have no excuse except real life exhaustion.

        But does an incomplete theory and unproven facts not kinda be the same thing? People believe “first, there was nothing, then it exploded” but the truth is we don’t know that.

        Then there is also all the stuff JW telescope discovered about the early universe that we didn’t expect, showing how imperfect our knowledge is.

        • ImWaitingForRetcons@lemmy.world
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          3 hours ago

          That’s not the case- an incomplete theory breaks down at some point, but it still has explanatory power. BBT has a lot of evidence, and we’ve made a lot of predictions using it that have been proven. Of course, you’re still correct in saying that JWST has shown numerous discrepancies, but that shows that it can be superseded by a better theory- an analogy would be Maxwell’s equations are good for most situations, but QED is the more complete theory that works even when Maxwell’s equations don’t.