Gary Zukav's "Wu Li Masters": Scientific progress

Gary Zukav's book "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" explains quantum mechanics in non-mathematical terms so that liberal arts majors like me can understand it. Since this book is a summary of everything we've learned in physics since the dawn of time, it is both incomplete, and also so packed full of ideas that I'm not going to reduce it to one entry. All I want to talk about in this entry is the question of what science is.

In school, I remember being taught that science is basically fact. The laws of Newton is how things move, the Atom looks like so, Evolution happens this way, etc. But what is not discussed much, and what certainly wasn't taught to me when I was very young, is that even the most firmly established theories are just that: theories. Science is a philosophy of total skepticism, where every theory however long-standing can be disproved with a single counterexample. Further, it doesn't claim to know what's actually happening in the world -- it's simply creating a predictive model that most simply and effectively predicts our observations of the world. It says nothing about why things are there either -- it only speaks of what we can observe and predict.

One of Einstein's way of explaining science was to say that science was like guessing at the contents of an unopenable watch. We can guess at the inner contents of the watch, and make elaborate theories about what's inside the watch, but in the end the best we can hope for is a theoretical model that exactly matches the outside appearances of the watch. The "ideal limit of knowledge", then, is to find a theory that is internally consistent and explains all observable phenomena.

The problem, though, is that in everyday life it is easy to forget the tenuousness of scientific "achievements." It is easy for centuries-old laws to be treated as fact and for one to even posit that science has shown us *why* things happen. For instance, why do things fall towards Earth? Gravity, of course. But what causes Gravity? Why, it's a Scientific Law. But we don't know why gravity happens, nor can we ever. Gravity's just an imaginary force we made up to explain and predict the behavior of bodies of mass. And we don't actually know Gravity always works. This seems ridiculous to say considering how consistent it's been, but one could say the same thing about Newtonian Physics. And one of the main tasks of the book is to explain Quantum Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics exists only because Newtonian Physics was shown decisively in the past century NOT TO WORK IN THE REALM OF THE VERY SMALL. All it takes is one counterexample.