Yang Xi fortune-telling song

"All scientific conclusions must have falsifiability, and the conclusion that cannot be falsified cannot be a scientific conclusion."

This conclusion is a criterion put forward by the famous philosopher karl popper in his book Conjecture and Refutation, and it is also a standard recognized by the scientific community to judge scientific conclusions. This standard means that whether a conclusion is scientific is not whether it is correct, but whether it can be proved wrong. What can be proved to be wrong is the scientific conclusion; Anything that can't be proved wrong is not a scientific conclusion.

For example, Newton's law of motion is a scientific conclusion, because we can verify this conclusion through experiments. If it does not conform to the experiment, it is called "falsification"; Because it has falsifiability, it is a scientific conclusion.

We have carried out hundreds of experiments to verify Newton's law. With Newton's law, people have greatly changed our world. However, this does not prove that Newton's law is correct.

In the last century, with the efforts of a large number of scientists, such as Einstein and Bohr, it was found that Newton's law was only established in the macroscopic low-speed field, the laws of motion in the microscopic world needed quantum mechanics, and the high-speed field needed relativity. From this, we can say that Newton's law has been "falsified" in a sense.

Nevertheless, Newton's law is still a scientific conclusion. It conforms to human's conventional understanding of the world, and at the same time, it can understand the world in a large range and improve people's lives. Learning Newton's law is not only because of his great strength in science, but also because of cultivating students' scientific methods.

So, are relativity and quantum mechanics correct? We don't know, but we are sure this is a scientific conclusion, because we can design experiments to "falsify", and once the falsification is successful, science will move forward again. The development process of science is a continuous cycle of experiment-theory-falsification.

Let's take the discovery of atomic structure as an example to study the development of science.

Maxwell predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves after putting forward the electromagnetic equation, and scientist Hertz confirmed the existence of electromagnetic waves through experiments. Later, Hertz first discovered cathode ray and proposed that it was electromagnetic wave.

JJ Tang Musun, director of Cavendish Laboratory, falsified Hertz's conclusion through cathode ray experiments. He pointed out that cathode rays are not electromagnetic waves, but negatively charged particles. All atoms contain such particles and are named electrons. At the same time, jj Tom Musun put forward a jujube cake model with atomic structure: positive charges are evenly distributed in atoms like cakes, and negative charges are embedded in positive charges like dates.

Rutherford, a student of Tang Musun, falsified Tang Musun's conclusion through alpha particle scattering experiments. He pointed out that the positive charge in the atom is not evenly distributed, but concentrated in a small nucleus at the center of the atom, and there are high-speed rotating electrons in a large space outside the nucleus. This is the nuclear structure model of atoms that we understand now. Rutherford and his student chadwick and others found that the nucleus is composed of protons and neutrons.

This process is the process of scientific progress. People sometimes prove their predecessors' conclusions through experiments, and sometimes falsify their conclusions through experiments. Learning the falsified conclusion is also an indispensable step in the development of learning science.

In this sense, Aristotle's heavy ball falling fast is also a scientific conclusion. Conversely, what cannot be falsified is not a scientific conclusion. For example, the conclusion of fortune telling is not a scientific conclusion, because fortune telling emphasizes "sincerity is the spirit". If the experimental results don't conform to the theory, the fortune teller can ignore you, because he can boil down the problem to an unobservable problem-your sincerity. Astrology, religion and so on, all have similar problems, not scientific conclusions.