How can your prove a theory?

Question

I was reading something and it said that you can never prove anything... in the exam, I put no ticks in the "proved" column... thinking that it was a trick question... when in actual fact, the proved column was to be ticked... and "sea floor spreading" has been proved... but I don't understand because I read that you can't prove any theories so how did sea floor spreading become proved?


Thankyou!

Answer 1

You obtain evidence from experiments and observation

Answer 2

Only things in mathematics can be proved. Scientific theories are never meant to be proved; they can only be supported or contradicted to by evidence. In the words of Stephen Hawking, "any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory."



A theory can be considered well-accepted when all available evidence supports it so far. Sea floor spreading is one of such theories, along with theory of evolution, theory of the Big Bang and many others. Even then, they are not considered proved.

Answer 3

A theory is only a man-made model of a slice of reality.

It takes into account all pertinent events and observations in that slice of reality and tries to predict when and how of similar events might occur or unseen yet observations.

It's contradicted by any new event or observation that doesn't match the prevailing theory.

If it occures, then you must either correct or redesign a new theory that takes into account all events or observations, including the ones that contradicted the previous theory.



You can build your theories using different tools: beliefs, philosophy, recipes, experimental science or mathematics.



Example:

Medieval japanese theory on earthquakes: Earthquakes are caused by the moves of a giant catfish carrying the world on its back.



That model could explain why the earth was shaking, provided you accept that a cat fish could carry earth on its back, that it could live in a place where it would eventually move etc..

When people made it it clear that Earth was round and that the catfish could not exist, they went searching for a better explanation.





Today, for instance, medecine is based on experiments. If one day you try and cure cancer by jumping on your left foot, and if any doctor in the world can reproduce the result, then even if you have no clue as to why it works, it would be integrated by medecine as a scientific way to cure cancer. Most drugs are developped that way. First they are tried to see what positive effect they might have, then scientists try to find an explanation, even if it's not needed to use the drug.





Particle physics is based on several mathematical model (quantum physics and relativity) that explain separate "slices" of reality: small particles for quantum physics - it's useless to describe common mechanics- or fast moving/heavy objects for relativity.

Scientist try to extend each model so it would be able to describe a wider "slice" of reality: fast moving heavy small particles.





Floor spreading theory was first thought of by Wegener, when he noticed that the Eastern coast of South America and the western coast of Africa matched. He found other matching continents, like a giant puzzle.

Furthermore they found similar fossiles on both part of the Atlantic. So he imagined that at one point in Earth history the different parts would have been closer and that something was pushing them apart.



People understood only later what moved them appart and the link with earthquakes. The theory still doesn't answer all the questions and is improved every year.

Answer 4

Strictly speaking, you were correct.



Any proposition that can be proven does not necessarily describe the real world. This is the realm of mathematicians.



Any proposition that purports to describe the real world cannot be proven. This is the realm of physicists (and other scientists).



Sea floor spreading (like 100 other scientific theories you could name) is so well supported by evidence that in the absence of any viable alternative theory, it can be treated as fact. This is what some folks mean when they say a theory is proven.



But this really is a bad question. It doesn't specify a standard of proof, so you aren't wrong to apply a strict mathematical standard and say that none were proven.



Really, your teacher ought to have more relevant stuff to ask you than a question of pure semantics.

Answer 5

It has been shown that the motion of the continents is linked to seafloor spreading. In the 1960s, the past record of geomagnetic reversals was noticed by observing the magnetic stripe "anomalies" on the ocean floor. This results in broadly evident "stripes" from which the past magnetic field polarity can be inferred by looking at the data gathered from simply towing a magnetometer on the sea surface or from an aircraft. The stripes on one side of the mid-ocean ridge were the mirror image of those on the other side. The seafloor must have originated on the earth's great fiery welts, like the mid-Atlantic Ridge and the East Pacific Rise.

Answer 6

sea floor spreading is not really a "theory" but a "hypothesis".



one can form the hypothesis that bottom of the sea floor is static. the scientific method requires that this hypothesis be tested via multiple independent experiments. and of course, the hypothesis that the sea floor is static turned out to be false.



thus any "theory" on the physics of the sea floor that assumed that the sea floor was static would at that point need to be modified.



a "theory" is a general model that attempts to describe all of the phenomena involved a given set of observations.



a "theory" strives to have *predictive power*



let's point out gravity. for hundreds of years, the Newtonian "theory" that F=G*m1*m2/r^2 worked very well. it worked fine in all sorts of cases.



for those cases, it was *predictive*.



however, in 1919, Eddington took a rather famous photograph on the island of Principe that blew a big hole in that theory. photons were deflected by a gravitational field.



*photons*!!!!



photons have mass=0 (not almost zero, not zero as far as we can tell, but *exactly* zero), so how on earth do they "see" gravity?!?!?



if you used the equation for F that i typed above and set m1=0, then the force is of course zero, so of course an object with mass=0 cannot be deflected by gravity. but of course, some photons were, in fact, deflected.



the most general theory of gravity thus had to be modified, and it took someone named Einstein and his "general relativity" to do it.



in this sense, newtons gravity is a great tool for everyday life (then and now), but in 1919 it was then, and only then, known that this picture is in fact not applicable in all cases... a more general and universal "theory" was required to explain *all* of the observations.



so, in actual fact, no theory can ever be *proved*. it survives as a useful tool to understand physical phenomena as long as new data does not come along and indicate a situation in which its predictions are completely wrong.



that's the best that the scientific method can do. and every day, scientists are trying their hardest to blow theories out of the water. that's precisely how understanding happens!



cheers

Answer 7

It's a bad question. A theory is only true until someone proves that it is not, but that usually involves that person making the necessary changes to the theory and publishing an update.

Answer 8

Yea you can prove the sea floor is spreading. You can't prove theories like "there are no black swans" because you may see one at some point and you can't prove that you won't so its only a theory.

Answer 9

Most likely this was proved through observation which employs the scientific method. It sounds like you were mixing some sort relativist philosophy with tenets native to the body of knowledge that is science.

Answer 10

You have to take practical examples and show its results to prove a theory.

Answer 11

A theory is a rational explaination of how something works.



You rationalise it by gathing data, but as Quantum Physics points out:

Something can be proven; there is always a chance it is not so.

Answer 12

That's a tricky one, but you're right. Talk to your teacher, I'm sure he didn't expect any students to think about it that way. He was probably using the word prove in a colloquial sense, to mean that it had been accepted by the scientific community.

Answer 13

Certain simple theories can be proven in terms of mathematical proof(s) and or physical reconstructions. An example of a simple((?) group of theories, might be Newton's laws of motion, which may be proven, for the everyday world but not the relativistic one, by experimental methods. As a more sophisticated example of a theory, consider Einstein’s predictions, from General Relativity, about the precession of the perihelion of Mercury or the gravitational bending of starlight as it passes close to the rim of the sun, both of which may be confirmed by careful observation. Mathematical concepts such as Euclidean geometry may be proven by simple mathematical manipulation. Newton's law of universal gravitational attraction may be proven using mathematical manipulation of the equations of conic sections (ellipses) and Kepler's laws of planetary motion.



However, not all of the theories of mathematics are provable! At the start of the twentieth century, the German mathematician David Hilbert set out to formalise mathematics so that it could logically prove all of its own axioms (laws). Alas, in 1931, the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel demonstrated that mathematics, as an area of enquiry/study, was incomplete and could not use itself too logically prove itself! A few years later, the English mathematician Alan Turing found that certain computer algorithms would never terminate, their calculations, and provide a definitive result.



Within physics, the non-classical theories of quantum mechanics, string theory, and even the standard model of elementary particle physics all depend upon mathematics for their structure. Since mathematics is not fully, self-provable then neither are the theories of physics. A physical theory uses 'off the shelf' mathematics that helps to provide a realistic picture of the phenomena being studied. Thus, a physics theory must be ‘supported’ by experimental observation and cannot be fully proven by observational data, except for very simple Newtonian in the everyday world.



Hence, to summarise - the philosopher Karl Popper argued that, ' ... a theory should be considered scientific if and only if it is falsifiable. ...'. The Wikipedia article, adds, '... Popper coined the term critical rationalism to describe his philosophy. The term indicates his rejection of classical empiricism, and of the observationalist-inductivist account of science that had grown out of it. Popper argued strongly against the latter, holding that scientific theories are abstract in nature, and can be tested only indirectly, by reference to their implications. He also held that scientific theory, and human knowledge generally, is irreducibly conjectural or hypothetical, and is generated by the creative imagination in order to solve problems that have arisen in specific historico-cultural settings. Logically, no number of positive outcomes at the level of experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory, but a single counterexample is logically decisive: it shows the theory, from which the implication is derived, to be false. Popper's account of the logical asymmetry between verification and falsifiability lies at the heart of his philosophy of science. It also inspired him to take falsifiability as his criterion of demarcation between what is and is not genuinely scientific: a theory should be considered scientific if and only if it is falsifiable. This led him to attack the claims of both psychoanalysis and contemporary Marxism to scientific status, on the basis that the theories enshrined by them are not falsifiable. Popper also wrote extensively against the famous Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. He strongly disagreed with Niels Bohr's instrumentalism and supported Albert Einstein's realist approach to scientific theories about the universe. ... '.



So it would seem that according to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, from mathematics, and Popper’s philosophy – at best scientific theories can only proven as false and cannot be fully proven as true!

Answer 14

you cant you can prove a theorUM like im=n maths (Pythagoras theorem) but a theory is just an explanation based on evidence - it is not proved

Answer 15

Of course you can prove theories - not all of them, but many.

Answer 16

Scientists never prove anything they only disprove.