Fact on theories

As an electronic engineering student, I studied most of my undergraduate education studying around electron’s properties and its behaviour. I did so even without actually seeing electron by my eyes and putting faith on university lecturers and scientists who have discovered and studied it before me. The question is, how can we spend whole life on something which we haven’t seen or touched and just putting faith on people and unquestioning whatever they have substantiated a long time ago, is correct? What if someone will discover that the electron that we used to know is not what it is? Will lives of all electronics and computer engineers jeopardise if such thing happens? Or, nothing much will happen as computers and electronics device will work same as they were working before the new discovery.

Most of our educational studies and professional work are based upon some sort of theories. These theories are either established by some facts or verified by other theories on which current theory is based upon. Now, if predictions of any theory are verified by a few different sources, then we can confirm that theory is full proof. But if theory is based upon assumptions that we can’t verify directly but only depends upon indirect evidence, how much can we trust that theory? Most theories in Physical science are based upon such assumptions and those assumptions are, at least most of the times, depends upon indirect evidence. The question arises at this point is that then how can we trust such theories?

For example, all information we have about our Sun is a result of indirect evidence or calculations made on earth by scientists. As it is not possible to actually go to the Sun and collect evidences, is it worth to put blind faith in whatever scientists tell us? Most tests carried out by scientific circles show that Sun will be still there for another 5 billions years. But what if scientists have made some mistakes in their calculations and what if those mistakes were so catastrophic that we misjudged the whole process of chemical reactions in the Sun’s core? As we don’t know the whole secret of physical world yet, what if we haven’t noticed one significant process happening in the Sun that can alter our whole perception about it? What if we found that instead of 5 billion years, Sun’s remaining life is only 50 years? The chance of that happening is very odd, but, still, there is a chance!

In order to expand our knowledge, we always use old scientific notions and expand them further. We generally believe in our predecessors and their work. But, as it has happened before, they might have omitted minor facts that weren’t important to them in the discovery of something but those facts were also not that much negligible as well not consider for the bigger and better result. This may lead us all to the false results and to the future that is different than what we have predicted. There is no point going back to the beginning of scientific and mathematical origin and start verifying everything. But, there always will be a dilemma whether to trust on someone’s work that we can’t verify personally. Hence, I think it is always worth considering the fact that unless theories are based upon pure facts, they are still theories and we shouldn’t put our blind faith on them.