What we knew about how the world works five hundred years ago was very different from what we know today. Newton’s theory of universal gravitation fails to account for phenomena at high velocities or strong gravitational fields. Presumably, what we know today is similarly very different from what we will know in five hundred years. Hence, we can’t really be sure that what we know actually explains what is real.
However, our scientific understanding of reality has been extremely successful in helping us shape the world we live in. We’ve built spacecraft that navigate the solar system, developed medicines that cure diseases, and created technologies that transform how we communicate and work.
How can we reconcile the success of science with the fact that our theories keep changing?