Theories are just theories, but some theories have more weight then others - what theory do you find the most credible?

  • jet@hackertalks.comOP
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    1 day ago

    Theory of Gravity - Has lots of weight behind it. Something everyone can demonstrate for themselves, seems like a highly likely theory

    • OfCourseNot@fedia.io
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      1 day ago

      No offence mate, but given this statement and the question in the op you should go back to the very basics, your understanding of science in general is seriously lacking.

      ‘Theory’, as in ‘theory of relativity’ or ‘theory of evolution’ for example, doesn’t means ‘conjecture’, it means ‘model’. It’s a framework that let us understand some phenomenon. Relativity for example is not very complete, it works perfectly in a macro scale but breaks at a subatomic level, for that we have the standard model. Evolution, tho, doesn’t break at all. A basic requirement for a proper theory is being able to make accurate predictions on its domain: with relativity we can predict how planets behave for example, we’ll need the standard model to do that for an electron.

      Out of the four fundamental forces gravity is the less well understood.

      • squaresinger@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Most often if a theory gets replaced, it actually gets expounded upon, fixing the edge cases where the old theory didn’t work.

        Newton works at “normal speeds” but doesn’t work when things move really fast, so Einstein fixed that with relativity, and quantum mechanics expounded on Einstein.

        But the older theories remain valid in their domains.

        That’s why when building a bridge you use Newton and not relativity or quantum mechanics.

        Neither Newton nor Relativity were wrong. They just don’t explain absolutely everything.

        • JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Aside from mass, antimatter and dark matter, something else is keeping the galaxies from flying apart?

      • Legianus@programming.dev
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        1 day ago

        Not really contradictions, there are those behaviours which you describe (i.e. speeds at the outer regions if galaxies faster than originally expected) and from those we come to things such as dark matter which describe these, but we don’t yet know what they are.

        It might be that the theory needs to be changed if there is no such thing as dark matter and it Is jnice calculation trick that actually mean something elsr in the real world, but as of right now it describes most things well.

        Alas, there is the disconnect between different theories that don’t work together (see Gravity and Quantum mechanics) or only on different scales