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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Newton’s theories give the same answers as Einstein’s theories up to a certain point of measurement accuracy.
A baseball pitched at 10 m/s riding on the back of a train traveling 10 m/s in the same direction, according to Newton, would be traveling 20 m/s. But according to Einstein, that baseball will be moving at 19.9999933287 m/s. Not exactly the same. But if your best speedometer only reads to an accuracy of 0.01 m/s, these are basically the same exact answer as far as anyone can tell.
The only thing that tipped Einstein off to the idea that Newton’s theories needed correction in the first place is that science was starting to get very precise. So precise that predictions made with Newton’s theories were starting to drift away from experimental evidence. Einstein wasn’t pulling random crap out of his ass as fanfiction for how the universe works, and he just happened to be right. He was very specifically looking for a way to correct Newton’s theories to re-align with the data. And the explanation he found has, as far as we can tell, succeeded at doing exactly that.
Is it possible that some day science will advance so far that predictions from Einstein’s theories start to drift away from the data? Sure. No reason to say they never could. But we don’t yet seem to have any evidence that this is the case. General relativity appears to have passed every test we’ve managed to throw at it so far… Or rather, the tests that it failed haven’t ruled out other factors, so we can’t say for certain that general relativity is the problem.
*IF* general relativity is one day replaced by a more comprehensive theory, it probably won’t be as meaningfully different as you’d think. General relativity as it is right now matches everything we currently see. Any more accurate system will also have to match everything we currently see, meaning it will have to behave exactly like general relativity already does, just with extra steps.
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