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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That’s why it’s called theories and not facts. It’s impossible to test every single scenario with out current tech. Until that moment happens, it will be a theory. It will become fact once it’s proven true without a single doubt. Einstein can be proven wrong anytime. And that’s a good thing. New theories that replace current theories are always a huge leap in science.
Einstein’s GTOR was able to make accurate predictions that Newtonian gravitation couldn’t. We know that it’s not completely accurate because there are still some phenomena that it can’t explain, like the behavior past the event horizon of a black hole.
There is certainly something that will explain it further. The reason for this is because einstein’s theory breaks down. You’re wrong in thinking that einstein disprove newton. Think of it as einstein’s calculation just being more precise. Newton’s equation works up to a certain time and distance (normal every day stuff). If you use einstein’s equations at those time and distance you’ll get the same thing. The future stuff will encompass einstein’s calculations and just expand on it.
Because in science it is encouraged to test out anything and everything. Scientists tested out Einstein’s Theory or Relativity by taking an atomic clock in outer space, and comparing it with an atomic clock on the Earth’s surface. They found that the two clocks diverged by a few nanoseconds.
There’s an essay from Isaac Asimov that is relevant here called [“The Relativity of Wrong”](https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html). It notes the fact that the earth is *not* actually a sphere; it’s an oblate spheroid. However, the difference between a sphere and an oblate spheroid is so slight compared to the difference between a flat circle and a sphere that it would be even *more* wrong to claim that both the flat earth model and the spherical earth model are “wrong”, as though wrongness is simply a binary and something that is *mostly* right is just as wrong as something that is *completely* wrong.
Newton wasn’t “wrong”; his models were simply *incomplete*. If you’re dealing with non-relativistic speeds and constant masses, Newton’s laws are still perfectly applicable. It’s only when you get relativistic speeds, or cases like rocketry where mass is changing with respect to time, that you need more specific equations that account for those edge cases.
It’s possible that someday in the future, someone will create an even more specific set of equations that account for both Einstein’s equations and further edge cases that we haven’t yet even discovered. But when that happens, that won’t *overturn* Einstein’s work; it will just *further refine* his work.
Theories are never a certainty; they only survive the most recent round of testing, or not.
We actually already know that Einstein wasn’t completely right. Relativity is a so-called “classical theory”, meaning it doesn’t take quantum effects into account. We know quantum effects are real, and relativity can’t deal with anything on the quantum scale. Some very smart researchers (or teams of researchers) will have to come up with a way of creating a theory of quantum that correctly describes relativistic effects, but they haven’t been able to so far.
Of course, that is not to say theories aren’t useful. They are the best tool we have for describing and explaining certain situations. In that regards, Newton was ‘right’ – in the realm of what Newton tried to describe, his laws of motion work perfectly. It is only when you try to describe extreme situations like objects moving at near the speed of light, that they break down. Newton had no clue about the speed of light. It was something between a few hundred kilometers per second and literally infinite.
Technically it is better to use Einsteins relativistic laws of motion instead of Newtons when describing medium events, i.e. objects of medium weight moving at medium speeds (reminder that an object like the Sun has a ‘medium weight’), but the difference would be so far down in the decimal places that practically you can just use Newton.
If you collide 2 objects and the result is an object moving at 20 m/s according to Newton and 19,99999998 m/s according to Einstein, for example, and the math for Newton is much easier, why bother with Einstein in that scenario?
Newton’s theory was not quite right. People observed the behavior of mercury, for example, and were able to measure small discrepancies. One of the first confirmations of Einstein was the observations of mercury. At this point there are no discrepancies with general relativity that I know of. If a person comes up with a new theory I’m not sure what they will use to confirm it because everything we have been able to measure has been consistent with GR. The new theory will need to replicate GR exactly in many scenarios and only differ in ways we haven’t measured yet.
You’re making the HUGE assumption that we are at our peak. That evolution has ended. That physics has been completely described. That we are aware of what is. That’s nonsense.
Newton didn’t pass all the tests. His theories broke down when things got really small. But they still worked well enough that they’re useful to this day. (Nobody’s breaking out quantum mechanics or general relativity to describe a baseball pitch. Newton’s laws of motion are more than good enough.)
The thing about scientific theories is that scientists keep trying to break them. That’s basically science. (Break something, come up with something better and then try to break that.) As the years go by, a theory that withstands every challenge just gains more and more credibility.
It doesn’t mean that we will never break it. (It could just be that we lack accurate enough measuring tools to actually observe it break down.) But when so many really smart physicists have spent the better part of a hundred years hacking away at Einstein’s work and it still won’t give way… We can have a fair degree of confidence that Einstein got something right.
The way science works is you make a prediction of how things work and if you can you check if those predictions line up with what we can observe.
So, for example, Newton did some predictions of how stuff bheaves and he was right for a lot of stuff, we could make experiments and the results would be just as predicted based on what we could measure.
Eventually, we started learning stuff that didn’t quite line up with how Newton and others said things should work. So people came up with news models of how things work, and the one that Einstein worked on proved to be accurate (to the point it predicted things we weren’t even able to test for until several decades later).
It’s possible that in the future we learn about something that doesn’t behave like Einstein said it should behave and then we have to think of why it behaves differently. But that doesn’t mean what he said is completely wrong, since we can still make accurate and reliable predictions with it just like we can with Newton’s theories.
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