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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ydars" data-source="post: 5137584" data-attributes="member: 62992">To go back to your original question where your friend was insisting that science tries to disprove its own hypotheses, this sounds like a misunderstanding of the way that Karl Popper suggested that science be done.His idea was simply that in order to find scientific truth, the easiest way is create a hypothesis, make a prediction based on that hypothesis and then design an experiment that will disprove the hypothesis by showing the prediction is false. The idea is not that you are trying to disprove the hypothesis for its own sake; the idea is that this is the fastest way of finding out if your idea is sound or not. It is sort of like playing devils advocate if you like or what you might call an 'acid test'. This 'Popperian method' was extremely influential in the early part of the 20th century, though I suspect many younger scientists won't have heard of Mr Popper.As for people's mistrust of science, this arises because the media portrays science as highly contradictory. This is because news is now more about entertainment and not education or truth. The media want a good fight. So if they are debating climate change, they will find some fringe guy who believes that man-made C02 is not responsible for increases in global temperature and then pit him against a main-stream scientist who represents the views of 95% of the scientific community who do believe in the evidence for climate change. The problem is, the media will not give the audience this context and it appears contradictory to them because both arguments are given equal weight on screen.The other reason for people's mistrust of science is because politicians use science in bad ways. For example, the UK Government at the height of the BSE crises was giving out 'scientific assurances' that infected beef was safe for humans to eat. The public took this to mean that science could not be trusted but in fact, all the prion biologists were shouting very loudly that what the government said was flat wrong but no-one listened.The problem is science is complicated but because of its power everyone wants use it to prove their point of view. People over here are now openly questioning the idea of climate change because of one cold winter.You also have to remember that old old adage; anything's possible when you don't know what you are talking about.</blockquote>

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