From the previous articles, we can see that what science creates is a model of the material world.
In practice, there are many models, each concerned with one aspect of the world around us. In some cases, it is demonstrated that these models are compatible with one another and in other cases this is assumed to be the case without formal proof. Occasionally, a pair of the generally accepted models are known to be incompatible. One example of this at present is the incompatibility between general relativity and quantum theories.
Incompatibilities between models, or other difficulties such as singularities, serve as a reminder that scientific theories are always a work in progress. The standard model in quantum physics, for example, is understood to be the best model that we’ve come up with so far. That is not to say that it is the last word in the matter. In a sense, every scientific theory is of an interim nature, valid until a better model is found.
This is not a defect of the scientific method. On the contrary, it is its main strength. Scientific knowledge keeps getting better and better because of it. Sometimes these improvements are incremental, when an existing model is adjusted to honour some observations that did not fit with the old version. In other cases, a whole new theory comes into being which overturns completely the knowledge in that realm. The two great twentieth century physics theories – relativity and quantum theory – are both in this category.
There is a sense in which a scientific theory is never strictly proven to be true. A hypothesis can often be shown to be false: a single inconvenient observation is enough to do that. As we cannot actually observe every particle in the universe, at every point of time, we can never be 100% certain that a scientific theory is true. We can only say that it is extremely probable, if it accords with all known observations, when many observations have been made.
So, science is creating an ever-more-accurate set of models of the material world. What it is not providing is an absolute truth.
