• howrar@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      How can you test/falsify the existence of something you can’t interact with in any way?

      • bostonbananarama@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Most likely you couldn’t. But sometimes you can be aware of something (X) simply by seeing the effect it has on other things, even if you can’t directly observe X. Think of Pluto, dark matter and dark energy; didn’t/don’t know what it is, but we know something is there.

        My original comment was pointing out that a scientific theory is a framework that takes into account all the data. So something that is untestable and unfalsifiable definitionally could not be a theory. You’d be in hypothesis territory at best, but likely just conjecture.

        • howrar@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Right, thanks for the clarification. Although in this context, the “theory” in question is the existence of alternate universes, so the most logical interpretation of your comment is that it is possible to test for the existence of an alternate universe.

    • skulblaka@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      There are a great many theories that are untestable and unfalsifiable. The existence of a God or a Creator is a hotly debated one, for instance.

        • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I think I know what you mean but if it’s what I think you are doing a terrible job at explaining it. Theories in the scientific jargon are not the same as theories in the common parlance. What the commoner calls a “theory” is what we call a conjecture or an hypothesis. A theory in science is a summarization of experimental results, so if this is your take, I get your point.

      • bostonbananarama@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        God is not a theory. There are no facts to support it and it has no predictive capabilities.

        Evolution is a theory that demonstrates that species change via changes in genes. It is supported by facts and studies across multiple disciplines and has predictive capabilities.

        One is science, the other is mythology.

        • jasory@programming.dev
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          10 months ago

          There are some facts to support it, the problem is in the latter. Merely describing a system isn’t sufficient, it’s predicting more information. One can just as easily describe physics “as the things that are” but this doesn’t let us find more information about the universe.