ABSTRACT
One of the key characteristics of scientific knowledge is its provisional nature. In other words, no matter the extent to which the community of scientists takes a certain idea to be a ‘fact’, based on tens of years of agreement with empirical measurement and countless successful predictions, there is always the possibility that what is taken to be the case might ultimately fall from grace. Having said this, much of science, and certainly much of what is currently taught in school constitutes a robust body of knowledge, with some of it dating back to the eighteenth century and earlier. For example, Newtonian mechanics was first published in the Principia in 1687 and the calculations that took Neil Armstrong and his crew to the surface of the Moon and back in 1969, some 300 years later, were based solidly on Newton’s work. In this sense large tracts of scientific knowledge are both stable and reliable.
