Explain how new scientific data can cause any existing scientific explanation to be supported, revised or reje

Question

Explain how new scientific data can cause any existing scientific explanation to be supported, revised or rejected

Answer 1

Best illustrated with some examples:

Confirmed - Einstein's theory of relativity.  It was devised 100 years ago with nothing more than observation and math.  But the math was so compelling that the astonishing, counter intuitive things this new theory told us were accepted by science.  It was 75-100 years before we were able to verify some of the conclusions with direct experiments conducted in space.  Einstein's theories were confirmed.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/wa...

Revised: The fate of the universe.  For most of scientific history the Universe was seen as eternal.  We revised this notion with the knowledge of the expanding universe and the cosmic background radiation.  The Big bang theory of the birth of the universe became the new paradigm.  The universe would expand ever more slowly then begin to retract into a big crunch and perhaps start the entire cycle a new. We developed the theory of dark matter to account for probability because there was not enough visible matter  to make the equations work.  But then we discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, not slowing down.  The dark matter than must exist should be slowing things down via gravity, but it was confirmed the universe expansion is accelerating.    So we revised the theory yet again to include dark energy, which over powers the gravity of visible and dark matter to expand the universe ever more quickly.  We are reasonably certain now that in the distant future all the visible galaxies outside our galactic neighborhood  will recede from view and we will be an island galaxy in a sea of blackness.  This theory could change yet again as more data comes in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy

Rejected:  Spicy foods cause stomach ulcers.  For 100 years doctors prescribed a bland diet to treat an ulcer.  But that did little more than help with discomfort.  Then a couple of sharp doctor noted that patients on long term anti-biotic therapy almost never had ulcers, and those that did prior to treatment seemed to heal with antibiotics.  So they suspected an infection was the cause of most ulcers and set out to find the germ.  They did.  They won a noble prize.  Now ulcer patients get Antibiotics.  The sad truth of this rejection of earlier bland diet dogma is that it took 15 years from proof of their discovery to general acceptance by the medical establishment.  Just imagine all of the spicy hot wings that went uneaten in that time.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medic...