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Topic: Have you ever heard controversy over foundational chemical theories?  (Read 2690 times)

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Offline smlgirl

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For example, the Molecular Orbital Theory has a lot of evidential support and has been mathematically tested, yet its still just a "theory" so I was just wondering if there are scientists out there that don't accept this theory or other foundational theories like Group Theory or density functional theory?

Maybe not as controversial as string theory haha but what are the loopholes?




Offline Arctic-Nation

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Re: Have you ever heard controversy over foundational chemical theories?
« Reply #1 on: April 03, 2010, 10:51:31 PM »
No, you're getting it wrong. There's a fundamental difference between a scientific theory and what the word 'theory' means in common parlance. As far as science is concerned, theories are fact. I'm too tired to explain all this, but read wikipedia and other reliable resources like talk.origins, and you'll understand.

Of course, there are always people who disagree with mainstream science, with theories that have gone nominally unchallenged for decades or even centuries. When dealing with these kinds of people, a certain level of discretion is advised. Some of them even might be scientists, but most of them will be not. Almost all of them will be crackpots. Or creationists, when discussing certain topics, but the difference is minimal. Even more of them will be wrong.

Actually, most of mainstream science these days is just.. right. It might not be complete, but it works. No matter how you look at it, it's good for what it's intended to be.

Offline Borek

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Re: Have you ever heard controversy over foundational chemical theories?
« Reply #2 on: April 04, 2010, 05:00:29 AM »
Apart from what Arctic-Nation wrote.

Every scientific theory has its range of applicability and it doesn't work outside. Newton gravity stops working when relativistic effects start to play a role. Does it mean Newton theory is wrong? No, it just means it should be not used where its approximations no longer hold.

Nature never tells us when we are right, it only tells us when we are wrong (I think it was Karl Popper who said that). That means we can't ever prove a theory to be right - no matter how many epxeriments confirm a theory, one that refutes it is enough. However, as long as we have not seen this experiment, theory is considered to be valid.

From this point of view all important theories we are using at the moment are valid. We either know precisely their range of applicability, or we know they work in the range we tested them up to now, we are just not sure where their range of applicability will end. To some extent LHC experiments are doing just that - looking for the limits of the Standard Model.
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