5.3 Limits to science
5.3.3 Karl Popper (1902-1994)

Karl Popper still provides the most incisive and efficient definition of science: Science is the knowledge that can be proved false – in his jargon, science is what is falsifiable.

According to Popper, science is a continuous exercise in refutation. Each experiment and observation aims at contradicting the accepted theory. Science would be nothing more than those theories saved from the falsification efforts of scientists. Popper puts systematic doubt as the foundation of the scientific approach. Scientists are driven by an ambition to discover and publish the observations that will contradict currently accepted theory – what Thomas Kuhn (the philosopher from section 5.3.1 [ http://www.wfsj.org/course/en/L5/L5P18.html ]), calls the "paradigm du jour" or "paradigm of the day."

In practice, most scientists most of the time are happy to repeat experiments and confirm previous results. Nevertheless, they also dream of finding the fault that could lead to new theory. The thousands of scientists impatiently waiting for the first runs of CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, are probably more interested in finding a "new physics" – opening new avenues – as in using the collider to confirm the existence of the famous Higgs boson, an elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model of Physics.


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