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Last week the popular geek webcomic xckd published a rather humorous little strip which poked fun at the difference between a scientist and a normal person. Reading the strip I immediately thought of Karl Popper, one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century.

Popper proposed a brilliant and important theory, in essence: "no number of positive outcomes at the level of experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory, but a single counterexample is logically decisive" -wiki. This means that no scientific theorem developed by humankind can ever be proven true by scientific testing, rather it is only believed to be true, until it is proven false. Thus, the only thing that can be achieved by scientific testing is not verifiability, but falsification.

Put in a practical context, let's say I run an experiment which attempts to test the laws of gravity. I walk to the top of a building and drop a tennis ball off the roof. Logic tells us that the ball will fall to the ground (excluding other extraneous factors). I can go on testing this theorem, dropping ball after ball: ten, twenty, a thousand, ten thousand tennis balls; every ball should drop to the ground. However, this doesn't prove that the one trillion-trillionth ball will also drop to the ground; it may just hover there in space. Thus, the theory of gravity is believed true because we are yet to find a decisive case that proves it incorrect.