Consider this unsettling fact: Newton's laws of motion, which sent humans to the moon and built our modern world, are technically wrong. Einstein showed they're merely approximations that break down at high speeds. Yet we still use them daily, and they work brilliantly. This paradox reveals something profound about how science actually operates.

The philosopher Karl Popper recognized that science doesn't advance by proving theories true—it progresses by trying to prove them false. This counterintuitive insight revolutionized our understanding of scientific method. Rather than accumulating confirmations, science gains strength through surviving attempts at refutation. The best theories aren't those we've proven right, but those we've failed to prove wrong despite our best efforts.

No amount of white swans can prove all swans are white, but a single black swan destroys the theory instantly. This asymmetry between confirmation and refutation lies at the heart of Popper's falsification principle. While we can never verify a universal claim through observation—there's always another swan we haven't seen—we can definitively falsify it with a single counterexample.

This creates a fundamental limitation: science can tell us what's definitely wrong, but never what's certainly right. A theory that predicts the sun will rise tomorrow gains support each morning it does, but we can't prove it will rise forever. We can only say it hasn't been falsified yet. This might seem like a weakness, but it's actually science's greatest strength.

By focusing on falsification rather than verification, science avoids the trap of confirmation bias. Instead of seeking supporting evidence, scientists actively hunt for observations that could destroy their theories. Einstein's relativity didn't prove Newton wrong everywhere—it showed precisely where Newtonian mechanics breaks down. This approach makes scientific knowledge uniquely self-correcting and reliable, even without certainty.

A theory that explains everything explains nothing. Consider astrology: no matter what happens in your life, an astrologer can find a celestial explanation after the fact. Your promotion? Jupiter's influence. Lost your job? Mercury in retrograde. This flexibility makes astrology unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific. Good scientific theories stick their necks out.

Einstein's general relativity made a bold, specific prediction: light from distant stars would bend around the sun by a precise amount. This wasn't a safe bet—if the 1919 eclipse expedition had measured different deflection, relativity would have been dead. The theory gained credibility not by being proven true, but by surviving this genuine risk of falsification.

The riskier and more precise a prediction, the more confidence we gain when it survives testing. A psychic claiming 'something significant will happen to you this year' risks nothing. A physicist calculating that a particle will appear at exactly 125.09 GeV risks everything. When CERN found the Higgs boson at almost exactly that mass, the Standard Model didn't become true—it became harder to dismiss. Theories earn trust by repeatedly putting themselves in harm's way and surviving.

Science advances through a peculiar form of creative destruction. Old theories don't get proven false so much as they get revealed as limited. Newtonian mechanics still works perfectly for building bridges and launching satellites—it just fails at speeds approaching light. Each falsification doesn't destroy knowledge; it defines boundaries and opens new territories for exploration.

This process accelerates discovery in ways that seeking proof never could. When scientists stop trying to confirm their ideas and start trying to break them, they quickly identify weaknesses and blind spots. The failure to falsify quantum mechanics despite decades of increasingly sophisticated attempts hasn't proven it true, but it has revealed astonishing features of reality we never would have discovered by seeking confirmation.

Abandoning certainty paradoxically makes science more reliable than any system claiming absolute truth. Religious dogmas and political ideologies resist change because they claim completeness. Science embraces its own fallibility, making it antifragile—it gets stronger from challenges. Every failed attempt to falsify a theory adds to our confidence without ever reaching certainty. We trade the false comfort of absolute truth for the genuine reliability of tested resilience.

Popper's insight reveals why science, despite never proving anything absolutely true, remains humanity's most reliable way of understanding reality. By seeking falsification rather than confirmation, science turns its apparent weakness—the inability to prove universal truths—into its greatest strength.

The next time you hear 'science proves,' remember: science doesn't prove, it survives. The theories we trust aren't those we've confirmed true, but those that have faced every challenge we can devise and emerged intact. In embracing uncertainty and inviting refutation, science achieves something paradoxical—reliable knowledge without absolute certainty.