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<blockquote data-quote="Morrus" data-source="post: 6041392" data-attributes="member: 1">What are you reading? Articles by journalists about science, or the actual papers? Because I don't believe there's such thing as a peer-reviewed scientific paper in existence which presents itself as fact (at least not one not by a crank of some kind); and popular science books written by scientists, in my experience, generally don't - to the point of overusing the word &quot;hypothesis&quot;.&nbsp;&nbsp;I don't think that's the fault of researchers. That's the fault of educators and media. Researchers do research and publish papers full of math. If the public and students are getting the wrong impression as to what those papers contain, blaming &quot;scientists&quot; is even less factual than the very articles you're criticizing.&nbsp;But there are certainly vast swathes of scientific research where it can be stated that the theories make correct predictions nearly 100% of the time; I would suggest that calling these, as you put it &quot;nearly 100% accurate&quot; is a perfectly reasonable turn of phrase to use.&nbsp;To take a silly, simple example - there's nothing at all wrong with a schoolteacher telling their students that speed is equal to distance divided by time.&nbsp; That's &quot;nearly 100% accurate&quot; for any normal purpose. Sure, you can get all nit-picky with 12 year-olds about relativity and such, but at that point you stop educating them and start confusing them.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Morrus, post: 6041392, member: 1"] What are you reading? Articles by journalists [I]about[/I] science, or the actual papers? Because I don't believe there's such thing as a peer-reviewed scientific paper in existence which presents itself as fact (at least not one not by a crank of some kind); and popular science books written by scientists, in my experience, generally don't - to the point of overusing the word "hypothesis". I don't think that's the fault of researchers. That's the fault of educators and media. Researchers do research and publish papers full of math. If the public and students are getting the wrong impression as to what those papers contain, blaming "scientists" is even less factual than the very articles you're criticizing. But there are certainly vast swathes of scientific research where it can be stated that the theories make correct predictions nearly 100% of the time; I would suggest that calling these, as you put it "nearly 100% accurate" is a perfectly reasonable turn of phrase to use. To take a silly, simple example - there's nothing at all wrong with a schoolteacher telling their students that speed is equal to distance divided by time. That's "nearly 100% accurate" for any normal purpose. Sure, you can get all nit-picky with 12 year-olds about relativity and such, but at that point you stop educating them and start confusing them. [/QUOTE]

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