Facts - until proven otherwise (repost)

It is a fact! This sentence gives me the shivers. Not the word fact itself, but the use of it. The description of a fact is not so permanent as it sounds: something that can be verified according to established standard of evaluation.

Especially scientists like the use of this word when describing fundamentals. Politicians use it when they do not wish to discuss something in further detail. But once I heard a very good definition of a PhD-student studying constants from a philosophical science dissertation. He spoke of the gravity constant, defined as 9.81 m/s(squared), is a fact. This is true, he said, on Earth... from a human perspective... under normal conditions... at current gravitational conditions... at ground level... ignoring air resistance... and so on. This opened my eyes in the way of not viewing constants as holy numbers or facts, but status quo indicators.

It was a fact the Earth was flat until proven otherwise by Copernicus. Flight was impossible (unless you were a bird) until the beginning of the 20th century, thanks to a couple of persistent bicycle mechanics. The atom was the smallest particle (defined by its name) in existence, until the quarks saw the light of day in 1961. The abandonment of previous facts for new are easily forgotten, because it becomes the next status quo and fact.

My most recent eye opener is the book "1421 - the year China discovered the world" by Gavin Menzies. After reading this I am sadly disappointed in western history education. If I could ask a high school class a question in History today it would not be "who discovered America?", but "was Columbus the third, fourth or later explorer to come to the American continent?" Even though it is fairly accepted that Leif Erikson was fist European to the continent, Columbus still gets credit for this feat. The knowledge of Chinese presence, even settlements, in America is overwhelming prior to Columbus, at least to Asian and local scholars, but the facts remain unchanged. Why? Because it is fact? Is is so provoking to debate a topic stamped as "fact" if there exist evidence of other options?

In my opinion facts are only good estimates for status quo until new data is uncovered - they are not truth, holy, or hammered in stone.

More food for thought
25th January 2010
An expansion to this post: Beginning this year the Dutch physicist Erik Verlinde did what I described with the fact of gravity - redefining it. Perhaps he is right in his theory, perhaps not, but it illustrates the fluid concept of "facts".

3rd February 2010
Another fine example of "facts - until proven otherwise". Diamant is the hardest material - or it was - because looking into meteorites something IS harder than a diamant.

23rd April 2016
Interesting talk about the difference between scientific belief and scientific
method by Rupert Sheldrake. Funny thing that he uses some of the same examples in this post (this talk had not been recorded when I wrote this blog entry).