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Comment by throwaway_ls | Hacker News Reader

> it *only* involves falsifiable theories and attempts to falsify them.

Your view is needlessly narrow. Coming up with new theories, collecting new data, verifying how theories fit that data is also part of the process even if it doesn't falsify them. To quote wikipedia it's on going process:

"The process in the scientific method involves making conjectures (hypothetical explanations), deriving predictions from the hypotheses as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments or empirical observations based on those predictions."

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The scientific process only involves falsifiable theories. The process does allow refining theories to fit new evidence, for sure, but a refined theory is a new theory, with the old one disproven, but this only works when theories are falsifiable. Therefore we never speak of "proven" or "confirmed" theories.

> The scientific process only involves falsifiable theories.

What is your source? Wikipedia disagrees with you.

Think some context here would help. Karl Popper established the limits of “truth” as much as Gödel and his incompleteness theorems did…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

TL;DR: If a theory isn’t falsifiable—if it doesn’t make any predictions which can be proved or disproved—then it’s more philosophy than science. By this standard, for example, string theory fails.

> The scientific process only involves falsifiable theories

This is definitely not true. One obvious example is that important scientific work is done turning unfalsifiable theories into falsifiable ones. After gravitational waves were predicted by general relativity there was some argument about whether they were a real observable thing or just an artifact of the maths. Those guys were undoubtedly doing "real science" while discussing something that some of them thought was undetectable (and therefore unfalsifiable).

Another example is that a lot of science is exploratory without any particular theory you're trying to falsify.

Science is more interesting and broad than your dogma about what it should be.

scientists only speak this formally in rare occasionally, like when they are trying to discredit a competitor.

The vast majority of the time, when a working scientists says "proved" they understand the epistemic limitations of the terminology.

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