Science can never answer “why.” In your example, the question why is just moved, from “why does it fall?” to “why does mass distort space-time?” In both cases physics just describes what happens.
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JoeyJoeJoeJr@lemmy.ml 1 month agoA law describes what happens, a theory explains why. The law of gravity says that if you drop an item, it will fall to the ground. The theory of relativity explains that the “fall” occurs due to the curvature of space time.
tate@lemmy.sdf.org 1 month ago
Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
But that is why it happens. Causality in most certainly something that can be discerned scientifically.
gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
But then, to follow up on your statement, what is the cause of all causes?
Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Not every action needs a cause. Especially when entering the subatomic level, quantum effects appear to be fully probabilistic. Nothing causes the electron to emit a photon exactly then at exactly that energy, it’s just something that happens.
Even at the largest scales, quantum effects have shaped the structure of superclusters of galaxies and in many models underpin the beginning of the universe.
At these extreme ends, the concept of causality gets weaker, and asking “Why?” starts to lose meaning. You could say nothing caused many things, or equally say they happened because they could.
In all cases encountered so far however, learning more has enabled us to identify new limits on possibility, and usually to narrow down on the details. It’s a practically endless series of "why"s that grow ever more exact, until we find the limits of what can be known. Maybe this chain has an end, maybe not, but to claim that science cannot answer any “Why?” is just wrong.
victorz@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I was referring to the difference between a theory and a hypothesis.
Theorem would also be interesting to add to the mix.
JoeyJoeJoeJr@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
In a scientific context, a hypothesis is a guess, based on current knowledge, including existing laws and theories. It explicitly leaves room to be wrong, and is intended to be tested to determine correctness (to be a valid hypothesis, it must be testable). The results of testing the hypothesis (i.e. running an experiment) may support or disprove existing laws/theories.
A theorem is something that is/can be proven from axioms (accepted/known truths). These are pretty well relegated to math and similar disciplines (e.g. computer science), that aren’t dealing with “reality,” so much as “ideas.” In the real world, a perfect right triangle can’t exist, so there’s no way to look at the representation of a triangle and prove anything about the lengths of its sides and their relations to each other, and certainly no way to extract truth that applies to all other right triangles. But in the conceptual world of math, it’s trivial to describe a perfect right triangle, and prove from simple axioms that the length of the hypotenuse is equal to the square root of the sum of the squares of the remaining two sides (the Pythagorean Theorem).
Note that while theorems are generally accepted as truth, they are still sometimes disproved - errors in proofs are possible, and even axioms can be found to be false, shaking up any theorems that were built from them.