Question: is your reasearch 100% true

Jon Copley answered on 17 Jun 2010:

If you mean “do I do what I say I do?”, then yes.

But if you mean “am I right 100% of the time in the conclusions that I get from my research”, then the answer is no. Getting things wrong is an important part of science, because science only progresses by learning from its “mistakes” – and if your ideas couldn’t be proved wrong, they actually wouldn’t be “scientific”.

However, whenever we come up with a new idea about the the world works, of course we like to think that we’ve got it right! And we collect evidence to test our ideas very carefully before we present them to other scientists, who then also check our work. But there’s always a chance of being proved wrong in the future, if some new piece of evidence comes along that gives us an even better idea of how the world actually works. Through that process, gradually over time, science gives us a better and better understanding of things.

So it’s important to be prepared to admit that you may be wrong in science, and to keep an open mind about other possible explanations – and then to devise experiments to test them, and so deduce which explanation is most likely to be correct. But that means, at any particular moment, some of your ideas will not be right, because they haven’t been fully tested yet against all the alternatives.

Because scientific ideas, by their very nature, *can* be proved wrong, that doesn’t mean that they *are* wrong. Scientific ideas that have stood the test of time, and still match every new piece of evidence that is collected, are very unlikely to be wrong. But strictly speaking, we never say our ideas have been “proven”. Though it sounds odd, science advances by proving things wrong, and doesn’t actually prove things right or “true”, in a strict logical / philosophical sense.