CHARLIE MARTIN: Why The Science Is Never Certain:

If you’d asked a physics teacher in 1886 if Newton’s Laws were absolutely certain, they most likely would have said yes. They probably would have in 1890, even though the Michelson–Morley experiment was the beginning of showing there were some things that weren’t quite the way people expected. By 1920, anyone up to date would have had to say, “Well, yes, except for some special conditions.”

Galileo’s teachers undoubtedly assured him that it was absolutely certain that heavy things fell faster than light things; by the time he died, people — at least the ones who’d heard of Galileo’s experiments — knew it wasn’t true, and wrapping this back to Newton, knowing that objects actually all fell at the same speed led Newton to formulate the Law of Universal Gravitation.

These were some of the greatest advances in science — and all of them would have been impossible if Galileo, and Newton, and Einstein had believed that science is ever certain.

Science doesn’t approach certainty until it can be reduced to engineering. And there are some things that work in engineering even though the science behind them isn’t clear.