What Scientists Really Do - An interesting piece in NY Review of Books by Priyamvada
Natarajan, Professor in the Departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale
University.
In the article, she notes:
“… In a word, the
general public has trouble understanding the provisionality of science.
Provisionality refers to the state of knowledge at a given time. Newton’s laws
of gravity, which we all learn in school, were once thought to be complete and
comprehensive. Now we know that while those laws offer an accurate
understanding of how fast an apple falls from a tree or how friction helps us
take a curve in the road, they are inadequate to describe the motion of
subatomic particles or the flight of satellites in space. For these we needed
Einstein’s new conceptions.”