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Therefore a good scientist is never 'certain'. Lack of certainty is precisely what makes conclusions more reliable than the conclusions of those who are certain: because the good scientist will be ready to shift to a different point of view if better elements of evidence, or novel arguments emerge. Therefore certainty is not only something of no use, but is in fact damaging, if we value reliability.

Failure to appreciate the value of the lack of certainty is at the origin of much silliness in our society. Are we sure that the Earth is going to keep heating up, if we do not do anything? Are we sure of the details of the current theory of evolution? Are we sure that modern medicine is always a better strategy than traditional ones? No we are not, in none of these cases.

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There are few certainties in life. Examples of certainty. The certainties of the cold war have been replaced by uncertainties. From the Hansard archive.

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Example from the Hansard archive. Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3. We must remember that for old people there are great certainties in the present climate of disrespect for the law. These examples are from the Cambridge English Corpus and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

The certainties and the theories of one generation are flatly contradicted by the next in a most remarkable way. However, one or two hard certainties do emerge from this amorphous background. I have, however, two certainties in my mind about the handling of this problem. What certainties can we give those countries over the next three years? There are certainties of substantial imports into this country, and imports represent employment here.

Temples - Certainty

The certainties which led to a certain force structure, which led to certain deployments and a certain mix of aircraft, no longer exist. He said that actuaries based themselves on absolute certainties. We are dealing with a major problem, and the beginning of wisdom in this subject is to recognise that there are no certainties. We should do our sums but should not be misled by them as certainties to the future. We can revise the prejudices and certainties of our younger days.

The Paradox of Certainty

How does a statistician reach such certainties in these circumstances? Such a dismissal rate gives the lie to the allegation that only certainties are prosecuted. Such certainties have gone and with it the logic of relying on such forces. See all examples of certainty. Of course there are ideas.

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These ideas might turn out to be right. Loop quantum gravity might turn out to be right, or not. String theory might turn out to be right, or not. Let me tell you a story to explain what I mean. What is the story with Anaximander? Until Anaximander, all the civilizations of the planet— everybody around the world—thought the structure of the world was the sky over our heads and the earth under our feet.

How did he get this? Well, obviously, he looked at the sky. You see things going around—the stars, the heavens, the moon, the planets, everything moves around and keeps turning around us. Except that nobody else came to this conclusion. In centuries and centuries of ancient civilizations, nobody got there. In spite of centuries of the Imperial Astronomical Institute, which was studying the sky. The Indians learned this only when the Greeks arrived to tell them. The genius of Anaximander was to answer this question.

We know his answer—from Aristotle, from other people.

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Why should the Earth itself fall? In other words, he realizes that the obvious generalization—from every heavy object falling to the Earth itself falling—might be wrong.


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He proposes an alternative, which is that objects fall toward the Earth, which means that the direction of falling changes around the Earth. This means that up and down become notions relative to the Earth. But if you think of the difficulty when we were children of understanding how people in Sydney could live upside-down, clearly this required changing something structural in our basic language in terms of which we understand the world. He understands something about reality essentially by changing something in the conceptual structure we use to grasp reality.

He frees us from prejudice, a prejudice that was ingrained in our conceptual structure for thinking about space. Why do I think this is interesting? Because I think this is what happens at every major step, at least in physics; in fact, I think this is what happened at every step in physics, not necessarily major. When I give a thesis to students, most of the time the problem I give for a thesis is not solved. On the one hand, there was Newtonian mechanics, which was extremely successful with its empirical content. But there was a contradiction between the two.

If Einstein had gone to school to learn what science is, if he had read Kuhn, and the philosophers explaining what science is, if he was any one of my colleagues today who are looking for a solution of the big problem of physics today, what would he do? The idea in classical mechanics that velocity is relative: forget about it.

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The Maxwell equations: forget about them. Because this is a volatile part of our knowledge. The theories themselves have to be changed, OK? What we keep solid is the data, and we modify the theory so that it makes sense coherently, and coherently with the data.

Einstein does the contrary. He takes the theories very seriously. He believes the theories. And the Maxwell equations are so successful that we should believe the Maxwell equations. What, then, are the aspects of doing science that I think are undervalued and should come up front?

First, science is about constructing visions of the world, about rearranging our conceptual structure, about creating new concepts which were not there before, and even more, about changing, challenging, the a priori that we have. It has nothing to do with the assembling of data and the ways of organizing the assembly of data.