The research is still out on which research should be searched for future research.
Throughout history, research has discovered things. But anything that is discovered, according to the scientific method, must be verified. A lot. In fact, to be thorough, everything should be constantly verified in case it suddenly isn’t true anymore.
“We live in a world of constant change, so perpetual verification is more important now than ever,” said Professor Kim Plinth. “Just because something has been proved a hundred times doesn’t mean it hasn’t changed. If something does change, we deserve to know about it.”
The trouble for 21st-century scientists is that there is so much research to verify.
“There are several thousand theories, so verifying them all takes up a lot of research time,” said Plinth. “But we should. What if atomic theory suddenly didn’t work? What if the gravitational constant suddenly wasn’t? What if tomorrow E equals MC cubed? They’re called theories for a reason. If we tested Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and measured both the position and momentum of a particle with a degree of certainty, we’d disprove the theory. And then where would we be?”
I asked about Sir Isaac Newton’s work, but Plinth was quick to correct me. “Those are laws of motion, not theories. Laws are dealt with by the Supreme Court. Maybe one day they’ll repeal them.”
After testing any theory, if the result is the same as it’s always been, which it mostly is, then we can say, with a high degree of certainty, that we didn’t show much. But Plinth says that what it does show, is that “we should test it again, just to be sure. And of course, that the results are publishable.”
