ol' dawg said:
...what do you call it when what was the previous explanation no longer is the full explanation?
Well, no thoughtful scientist is likely to claim any theory's a full explanation, but that aside, we call it the same thing we called it before. Newtons Laws are still Newton's Laws,and they're still in wide use. Newtonian dynamics is all NASA uses to calculate spacecraft trajectories. (General relativity is more accurate, but the difference is so trivial it's not worth the extra effort--and it's substantial--to calculate such routine stuff with it.) It's the new explanation that gets called something else. Special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, are all new stuff; the old stuff is still called whatever it was called before.
My original statement said that until we know everything we cannot categorically state that an explanation is the final truth
Right, and no scientist worthy of the name would disagree. There are no final truths in the scientific view, except for relatively trivial or very broad general statements. The claim that the earth orbits the sun, for instance, is a fact beyond dispute, as does the statement that living things evolve, so in a sense we could claim those are final truths. The devil's in the details.
...what do we call it when the result is different from what we expected according to our theory?
A surprise? :wink: Generally, first it's called an anomaly, on the initial assumption that something went wrong with the testing procedure or the observations or the data recording or something. And 99+% of the time that's exactly what it turns out to be. If other reputable people (and it has to be lots of other people, not just a couple of nerdy weirdos working in somebody's basement) get the same result, inconsistent with theory, it becomes an unresolved problem, and there will be a flurry of attempts to explain it within the limits of the theory. Scientists are very conservative with their theories, they hate to throw away a good one that's worked well for a long time. And eventually the theory will be modified or replaced by a new one that accounts correctly for the original anomalous observation.
Just because we don't have the observation tools available at this moment does not mean we never will have those tools, and when we have those tools we will have a new explanation. Not necessarily a different explanation, but at least a more complete explanation.
Right again, and that's exactly what's wrong with Intelligent Design as a theory, as I tried to explain to Extrafire about a hundred times in this thread. ID implicitly assumes we'll never have those tools, they don't exist, and ID itself is the final truth.
When I say "just a theory" I am not belittling the scientific method, I am just suggesting that the final answer is not available yet.
And probably never will be, if the past is any guide. Understood though; I do appreciate your more detailed explanation of what you meant. Despite a lifetime of training and work in science, I'm just as capable of irrationality and emotional reactions as the next guy. It was the phrase "just a theory" that set me off; that's the single most common criticism creationists throw at the theory of evolution, the clear implication being that it's just an idle speculation of no particular substance. It's a deliberate confusion of different meanings, which they do a lot, and it's both ignorant and dishonest.
You, however, appear to be neither. Good input, glad you're aboard.