Originally Posted By: hatt
The flat earth guys were saying the exact quote back in the day.
Who ever demonstrated by the scientific method that the world is flat? Additionally, be careful about what you call settled science, and where and why revisions occur.
Classical mechanics are perfectly valid for all kinds of day to day things, including getting man to the moon. Relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle are not needed to accomplish such things. When you get to really tiny or really large scales, classical mechanics has some issues.
Note that you can use the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle on macroscopic objects, like a train. However, the calculated uncertainty will be significantly smaller than the measurement error, rendering it useless in the first place.
Despite the failings of things like classical mechanics in certain arenas, as I said, they work just fine almost all of the time. And, the beauty is that any mathematician, engineer, or physicist on the board can calculate the motion of a falling object independently, and all will come up with the same result. And, those who go to the lab can verify that result experimentally.
Of course, I always give meteorologists a hard time. If you give the same set of data to two astrologists, you get different predictions. Hence, it's not a science. You give two meteorologists the same data, they come up with different predictions. Hence, it's not a science, either.