questioner121 wrote:Take for example the dual nature of light as a wave or particle. The original theory was that light only had wave properties. This was due to numerous experiments being carried out at the time to prove this. It's only later on that light was found to have both wave and particle properties due to new experiments.
Take for example astronomy. It was through rigorous scientific means that it was determined that the sun orbited the earth with the rest of the planets, they even worked out the orbits of all the planets using their scientific methods. Today the earth orbits the sun (theoretically I may add).
Before criticizing the scientific method, by using examples it is often a good idea to have a knowledge of the history of science, then you will not fall into making mistakes like this, which is either due to bad understanding or bad teaching.
The first major theory of light was by Isaac Newton
In 1704, Newton published "Opticks", in which he expounded his corpuscular theory of light. He considered light to be made up of extremely subtle corpuscles, that ordinary matter was made of grosser corpuscles and speculated that through a kind of alchemical transmutation "Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another, ...and may not Bodies receive much of their Activity from the Particles of Light which enter their Composition?" (Wikipedia)
In other words he thought that light was composed of very small solid particles.
There were several major objections to Newton's Corpuscular Theory, principally one of Newton's own observation, that of Newton's Rings, which he explained by using a similarity to sound waves. It was dealt an apparent death blow by Thomas Young in 180(3) when he used a Wave Theory of Light to explain interference patterns, best illustrated in the two slit experiment, as because of the way the interference patterns could not be explained by the Corpuscular Theory.
However by the end of the 19th century the wave theory of light was causing problems as it did not explain the photoelectric effect (solar panels generate electricity using this effect) and it Albert Einstein who accounted for this effect in 1905 by theorising the existence of quanta of light (photon). And it was this paper which gave rise to the wave-particle duality which is now used. It was this paper for which Einstein won the Nobel Prize and not as is often thought General Relativity.
So theories of light have gone from particles to waves to wave-particles in order to accommodate experiment.
As to the Earth orbiting the Sun only being a theory just have a look at some of the data and images from the Voyager probes and you will find we now have real observational evidence that the Earth orbits the Sun. It's nice when observation proves theory.
If you want to stick to "goddidit" then feel free, just remember that every so often reality has a distressing tendency to stick the finger up at mythological assertions.
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
George Bernard Shaw
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