forum for week of 19 September

While doing the readings I kept thinking about a lot of things I learned in the History of Science. For a long while Physicists believed in Newtonian physics as the primary physics that ran the universe. However, with the advent of Einstein's Theory of Relativity and, later, with Quantum Mechanics scientists soon realized that the new evidence showed things were not as cut and dry as they believed; the world view they held was actually not entirely correct because ToR and QM complicated the Newtonian framework.

The issue is that we'll never know when we have enough evidence to support a belief. If we decided that we had enough evidence for some theory and that it was settled and done, case closed, then we'd be drawing a line arbitrarily in the sand as to what was enough evidence. Does this mean we shouldn't believe things ever? No, I think that's a step far into the opposite extreme. But, I think it's good to always have the caveat in our minds that even if we have a seemingly insurmountable amount of evidence for some belief, that we can never predict what new evidence might come up and how it might change our views. Essentially, we have to be ready to change our beliefs when new evidence becomes available because we can never know when enough is enough.