This is something I’ve been wondering about for some time. Is it possible that some laws of physics are straight-up wrong, and can be disproved as our understanding/technology improves? How concrete are the laws of physics? Is it possible for us to be absolutely certain about anything?
In: Physics
“Laws” and “Theories” in science are written in such a way that they are [Falsifiable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability) which means that it would be possible to prove them wrong
There are statements that are impossible to prove wrong like if I were to claim that there were an invisible teapot in orbit around Mars that is completely invisible to all detection methods ever, you have no way to even approach that to disprove it, the statement itself is impossible to prove false, it is “unfalsifiable”
But laws and theories in science and math come with hard rules that you could prove don’t actually align with reality. If you show up with good data showing that gravity *actually* falls off with Radius^2.005 and not Radius^2 then you will have proved Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation to be incorrect. There’ll be a lot of push back and people will rerun your experiment to double check but if it holds up we’d go through and update the equation in every textbook.
In general we try not to call something a “Law” unless it has sooooo much existing experimental evidence behind it that its exceptionally unlikely to be far off of reality
There are also a lot of poorly represented theories in science that may be competing to be the leading theory with one ahead at any given time and that leads to a lot of public confusion, but providing the particle theory of light wrong didn’t mean that the physics was straight up wrong, just that our modeling of it needed adjustment because light sometimes does act like a particle.
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