We constantly say that Einstein’s General and Special theories of relativity have passed many different tests, insenuating their accuracy.
Before Einsten, we tested Isaac Newton’s theories, which also passed with accuracy until Einstein came along.
What’s to say another Einstein/Newton comes along 200-300 years from now to dispute Einstein’s theories?
Is that even possible or are his theories grounded in certainty at this point?
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We don’t just think general relativity may not be the final theory of everything, we KNOW it’s not. We’ve known for a hundred years. That is because our two main theories in physics: general relativity and quantum mechanics, have inconsistencies that can’t be true at the same time. But we don’t know enough to fix it. And although we’ve made progress, like proving the Higgs boson exists; and there have been attempts at unifying them like string theory (which turned out to be more hype than any result); a complete unified theory remains elusive.
Yet these models still work for practical purposes. If you’re an engineer, building houses or designing equipment, you’re still using Newtonian physics, the difference in Einstenian theory would be so small it ain’t worth bothering with in most cases.
My favorite example of so called “disproven” theories is the curvature of the Earth. Naive logic may tell you that the Earth is flat. Stuff falls down etc. And most of the time in every day problem solving it’s fine to treat it as if it WAS flat. That tiny difference between a very flat curve and a truly flat surface is so small it is not worth bothering with. However, by observing the horizon, sunlight etc. you can easily come to the conclusion that the Earth is round. Ancient people’ve done it, even correctly calculated the size of the Earth. But this isn’t quite true either. The Earth isn’t a sphere, it’s a geoid (irregular-shaped ball). However, pay attention: each of our subsequent models *encompassed* the previous model. It could account for everything they accounted for and allowed for them to be true in a specialized case. What is NOT ever going to happen is that we find out that the Earth is a cube. Successive models can be thought of as refinements. We find some phenomenon that doesn’t quite fit or one we could not explore before, and make adjustments.
It’s important also that EVERY model is an approximation, otherwise it wouldn’t be practical. When you say “the car has 3 people inside it” do you care that the people are of different size, so to be fair you should be adding them up like: 0.87 person + 1.12 of a person +… etc. In fact it’s kind of a miracle that reality can be boiled down to a few relatively simple laws that can fit into a human brain.
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