a lot of people have a poor understanding of science, even people who love and promote scientific rationality. i want to address one issue i see periodically, in the hopes that you dear reader can benefit
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specifically, it's the difference be theories and phenomena.
a few days ago, someone tweeted that the Church Turing Thesis was a fact of reality and I commented that it was a thesis, a hypothesis, not proven fact. he then DMed me saying gravity was also a thesis not a fact
@beka_valentine This is tangential, but it is odd how many people take not only the Church-Turing thesis as a matter of fact but who also do so with the "Church-Turing-Deutsch thesis", while also confusing the two!
this person isn't stupid, isn't anti-science, he's a big science enjoyer
but this thing he said "Gravity is also just a thesis, not a proven fact" is just flat out wrong, and is the exact same claim that actual anti-science nutjob fundamentalists make about evolution, but worse
so lets talk about why gravity is not a thesis
when you are standing here on earth, in your normal life, and you are holding an only in your hand, and open your hand, usually (tho not always) it falls to the floor
this is an observed fact, a phenomenon that happens. you see it with your eyes, feel it, hear it, etc.
we don't have special magical insight into why this happens, but we know it does. just look! open your eyes!
sometimes it doesnt happen. a balloon might float upwards. that's also a thing you just open your eyes and see happen
gravity is just the name for this phenomenon. you could use a more complicated name, like "the tendency that some objects have to fall to the floor when released"
thats verbose, but that's just as good
neither this long phrase, nor the single word "gravity", attempt to explain anything, no insight is had into WHY its happening or even HOW its happening, it's just a name for a phenomenon, a name for a fact that we have witnessed
when we come to try to answer the question WHY does it happen, we more into a realm full of non-facts
we say things like "perhaps the reason why is that everything has a natural place, and when its not in that place, it moves to it."
perhaps we say "some objects have as their natural place the center of the universe. for other objects, their natural place is far from the center. and so those objects which have their natural place at the center of the universe naturally rush toward it"
"and when enough objects head their, they cluimp together and forma big ball, the earth. when you hold an object up and let it go, it can move closer to the center of the universe where it seeks to be, so it moves toward the center"
now this is a thesis, a hypothesis, an ATTEMPTED explanation
in particular, this was Aristotle's attempt to explain the observation of gravity
it an attempt to explain the observation that some objects have a tendency to move toward the floor when released
the THESIS was wrong, it was not a very good explanation of gravity
but gravity was still just a fact of life when we finally decided Artistotle's thesis was wrong
because gravity is an observation not an explanation
in fact, when we finally moved beyond Aristotle, it was not by offering a new explanation at all. Newton famously provided a very rich and complete _description_ of gravity, but never any explanation for gravity
and other natural philosophers of his time disliked this
