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Cosmology
225 formulation of a theory or principle to explain the facts, because science is emphatically not a catalogue of facts but an attempt to fit them into a rational scheme. It is expected of a theory or a principle that it shall be capable of experimental verification and shall lead to a search for new facts. Thus the journey is continued ever onwards into new knowledge. The characteristic feature of this method is that it is constantly in touch with experimental facts and that is why science can justly claim to be the pursuit of truth. But are the theories of science absolute truths ? No, they are not
"Science is a series of approximations to the truth; at no stage do we claim to have reached finality; any theory is liable to revision in the light of new facts.......... This is both the joy and inspiration of science that there appears to be no end to new knowledge with its interest. Each advance yields a more far-reaching and interesting picture of the physical world, while at the same time opening up fresh views in the shape of new problems awaiting solution."*
Leopold Infeld in The World in Modern Science says:
“Scientific theory is an attempt to form a mental picture of the reality which surrounds us. It may a embrance either a narrow or wide range of facts and also experimental laws, bringing them into due order. Science is not, however, a collection of laws and a haphazard agglomeration of facts. Theory, to begin with, binds them together with a common idea, and creates a picture of reality from which particular facts follow by a process of logical reasoning....... Theory is something more; it is a creative agent, a guide to a land of new and unknown phenomena; it shows how to evolve new systems and to discover new laws. It draws its life blood from experiments which confirm its conclusions. Experiments which conflict with its deductions overthrow and destroy it. Experiment is and will always remain the final court of appeal deciding the fate of a theory.
"How do theories arise ? How is our mental picture of the world which surrounds us formed and developed ? Do we obtain at first a rough sketch, a faint outline, which, as we proceed, gains in ciearness and firmness and gathers new and bright colours whilst retaining the starp and character of the original outline ? In other words, is the development of a theory merely a process of evolution, or do there occur cataclysms, great revolutions which in a short space of time transform our whole physical outlook ?
"In the history of scientific development we discern both these processes --the evolutionary and the revolutionary. Evolution is the outcome of the collective efforts of generations, of the brilliant successes of illustrious men, and of minor but useful labours which serve to amplify our theoretical ideas; it is the gradual building up of the structure of science on foundations which have already been laid. In the course of evolution great ideas grow and
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• A. W. Barton.
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