Some people believe in science. They don't take the facts and understand them, they just say "Science says this is true. Anyone who disagrees needs to be shouted down." They will shame people for expressing any doubt against a "scientific consensus". This is actually the opposite of science.
For instance, the Theory of Gravity. I know people who take it to be a law, even though science itself hasn't moved it into that category. If you dare to suggest that there might be some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism for gravity, they will literally get louder and louder until you stop arguing. They won't provide any evidence, they'll just keep saying the same thing over and over.
And it happens for this that are much less certain, too.
You mean Newton's Law of gravity [1]?
I'm not sure where you get the idea there are "theories" and "laws" in science and science moves things from one category to the other.
The closest I can find is this distinction: "Scientific theories explain why something happens, whereas scientific law describes what happens." [2]
By this description, laws generally happen first, then theory, because observation makes it clear what happens before we understand why it happens.
In which case law and theory go hand in hand in pretty much every single law and theory I can think of (and the page lists zillions)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gr...
What exactly is this link demonstrating?
Adding to this, belief in science actually means believing in the _process_ of scientific discovery, i.e. believing that _eventually_ the "truth" will be discovered.
As you correctly point out, questioning the current consensus is a fundamental part of the process, but not all challenges to scientific knowledge are legitimate. Many (most?) concerns you hear in the mainstream media are not legitimate but based on logical fallacies, strawmen, ad hominem attacks, etc. I found this list [1] quite useful to guard against such unfounded attacks.
[1] http://utminers.utep.edu/omwilliamson/ENGL1311/fallacies.htm
Almost literally every physicist since Newton has believed that there is some sort of underlying theory which explains gravity. Its hard to imagine how anyone could get the idea that the matter was somehow settled.
I'd love it if you could share more context.
To compare it to an actual hot-button issue, we know more about the mechanisms of evolution than we do about the mechanisms of gravity.
We know kind of how it behaves at various scales, but we don't know why it does. We don't know what makes gravity. Why do denser objects have more of it. Why is it weaker than other forces, yet felt on larger scales? Does it actually exist or is it an emergent property kind of like the centripetal force (or is it centrifugal, I keep getting those flopped)?
A suggestion that there may be a yet undiscovered mechanism for gravity isn't useful to science. It's imaginative perhaps, but without a piece of math, or a suggestion for an experiment by which to test it, it's just science fiction. Ideas are cheap.
How do you know the impact of something that's undiscovered? Also how do discover new things but by looking where others aren't?
Science is a powerful contributor to the sum of human knowledge, but it's absolutely not the only pillar of human knowledge and there's a lot of people who think that scientific advancement means we can just do away with philosophy, politics, and other fields like that altogether, as though one day with the right equations all of ethics or culture is just going to pop out of physics. These people don't just throw the baby but the whole nursery out with the bathwater in my opinion!
> For instance, the Theory of Gravity. I know people who take it to be a law, even though science itself hasn't moved it into that category. If you dare to suggest that there might be some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism for gravity
There is no scientific consensus on the mechanism that is causing gravity, at least not on the level you suggest. There is consensus on how gravity behaves, in regimes we can currently observe.
The problem with suggesting "some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism" is that you can generate arbitrary many such mechanisms, because there aren't good options yet for experimental corroboration. We all have favorite ideas for how gravity might work behind the scenes, and it absolutely is fun to speculate. But if your goal is to actually make a contribution, your need to come up with an idea that can be falsified.
In my opinion you are completely within your rights to make claims that contradict empirical findings or theoretical frameworks. There often are holes in our knowledge, and continuously re-examining established science is absolutely part of the process. Of course, the burden of proof is on you in that case. But science is absolutely meant to be a living process.
Doubt based on what? This is the classic “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”. The scientific consensus absolutely can be wrong on something, but people that read a few Facebook articles and think they’re argument holds any weight whatsoever deserve to be shamed. You want to question the scientific consensus? Conduct a study or get in a lab, have it peer reviewed. If you want to say “I think the major experts and accumulated understanding in this field are wrong ” then you are going to have to bring more to the table than some random doubts and suggestions.
> For instance, the Theory of Gravity.
Wonderful example. As almost every physicist has stories of people that send them their pet theories about theoretical physics models. Have they done mathematical models? Of course not. But they are sure their theory is going to crack this unifying theory wide open. Maybe ask yourself “if I disagree with all the experts, have they all misunderstood what I am seeing or do I not understand the subject as much as I think I do?” Shame is the cousin to humility.
Often it's just an equation that fits some data for a range of values.
Almost all laws are found in the physical sciences. Some examples are: Ohm's Law, Universal Gravitation, Coulomb's law, and Kirchhoff's laws. None of these are perfect descriptions of reality.
"Theory" does NOT mean "unproven". That's "conjecture".
What a strange example. Has this ever happened to you? Additionally, does General Relativity count as "an underlying mechanism for gravity"?
But you misunderstand what the words "theory" or "law" mean in scientific usage such as the "theory of gravity".
https://www.livescience.com/21457-what-is-a-law-in-science-d...
