Science Forums 2

[Tormod]

Josephine, before I ban you for being endlessly obnoxious, please try to straighten your brain out for a second.

Special relativity is a theory. As a theory it is coherent and the predictions it makes were revolutionary and infuriating at the time, yet today they are becoming more and more understood.

As a theory, it makes perfect logical sense. That is why it was one of the major innovations in human history.

However, Einstein's theories are very difficult to understand.

Look at it this way: it is easy to learn how to drive a car (for most people, at least). But it is extremely difficult to build one yourself. You can take it apart, yet it wouldn't instantly become clear to you what each part does, why they are were they are, or even what they are needed for in the first place.

So it is with scientific theories - you study what has been done before, try to understand it. A theory may make more or less sense to each and every one of us, but there are rules for how a theory must be constructed, just like there are certain ways a car needs to be built in order to work.

These things are, for example, coherence, logic (ie, A required B, so we need to have B which then requires C, or even A1 etc), testability (we must be able to test out the car, but also each part of it).

Yet we may not have a complete understanding of how the car is constructed, nor can we construct our own. But we can study it and learn. We can appreciate it for the practical uses it has. But it is still just a car.

The same goes for a scientific theory. As long as it follows the requirements of proof, validity, logic and testability, it is accepted as a theory and can make perfect logical sense. We don't have to understand it to accept this.

In fact, this is the very reason there are things like peer reviewed journals, scientific societies etc - so that people can submit theories and have them thoroughly tested by *many* others. When this is doen, we accept the new theory as a theory. Nobody is saying it is the only truth or even that it is necessarily correct. But it is, at the time, the best way to describe what we observe.