A General Image Theory of science theories.

2. Conflicts around 'There is only one valid theory'.

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This 'General Image Theory of science theories' challenges the most basic principle of science, the claim that there can be only one valid theory and it must disprove all others. Yet this most basic challenge is undoubtedly correct, despite the only-one-theory principle being supported by almost every scientist ever to date.

In the spirit of William Gilbert this site is not addressed to the crass multitude of grant-funded scientists content to kick around the narrow range of ideas that today's science journals consider fashionable, but to the free spirit happy to labour hard and dig deep to find real truths and not to foolishly believe them to be easily found on Wikipedia or Discovery Channel.

Given that that one thing can clearly have more than one description, and that any science theory is basically an attempted description of some aspect of a universe, it seems clear that any valid science theory should allow of some other valid compatible image theory or theories.

Yet all four major scientists especially considered on this website, and indeed every scientist to date, have all basically claimed that there can only be one valid theory and it disproves all other theories. But it is to be noted that there have been some science ideas like wave-particle duality theory, and to a lesser degree blackbox theory, that in fact indicate some scientific unease with the 'only one valid theory' principle.

Isaac Newton hit what he saw as a major dilemma in finding that the two basic physics theories of action-at-distance William Gilbert and of push-physics Rene Descartes failed to disprove the other and that both seemed basically consistent with the known mathematical laws of physics of the time. Newton side-stepped that dilemma by claiming that science is really limited to blackbox mathematical laws concerning 'seens', so that the Gilbert and Descartes explanation theories based on different 'unseens' were really philosophical hypotheses including untestable unseens that could not be validated and so were outside science in philosophy where 'only one valid' need not apply. Newton was acutely concerned about this dilemma and saw his blackbox science position as essential if science itself was to hold to the 'only one valid theory' principle to which he was really fully committed. He concluded that some one form of either Gilbert physics or Descartes physics must be true - though it might never be possible to prove which.

Modern physics blindly ignores Newton's Dilemma by wrongly taking his and all previous physics theory as disproved. And another physics theory dilemma, that Newton had a small issue with, has also persisted and expanded around wave theory vs particle theory. This dilemma began with light theory, which in Newton's time had both a particle theory (Newton's 'corpuscular' theory) and a wave theory. Newton felt that only the maths mattered, and the different explanations might be only untestable philosophic hypotheses. But the wave theory of light seemed to prevail perhaps without actually disproving the particle theory. Then Einstein showed that some experimental light behaviour was particulate, or 'quantal', and claimed that light both actually was a wave and actually was not a wave but a particle. Several formulations of this wave-particle duality theory have not given anything widely agreeable, and some experiments claiming to follow light paths may involve light absorption and re-emission or combine responses to light with responses to some other signal emitted by light photons ? Variously formulated 'dualist' theories of light have been extended to all particles, now claimed to all be also waves, so that what should be two different theories are claimed to be some one 'dualist theory' accepting contradiction. Things are something, and are also not. So physics now can hold on to 'only one theory' but only by allowing basic contradictions within it which in both logic and in classical science disproves any theory.

Bohr's strange principle of complementarity, that the observation of two properties such as position and momentum requires mutually exclusive experimental arrangements, has been taken as meaning that mutually exclusive modes of language or theories (such as the language or theory of particles and the language or theory of waves are assumed to be) can be used in the description of an object, but not simultaneously. Of course some like Heisenberg have taken it as only meaning that no description or theory of an object can be certain and the only valid description or theory must be a probabilistic one.

It is certainly clear that at least modern physics theory does contain substantial logical conflicts, and that some of these can be resolved by a General Image Theory of Science Theories that allows of some sets of valid compatible image theories instead of doggedly trying to hold to the clearly false 'only one valid theory' principle.

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(Anomalies regarding modern physics theory have long totally discouraged certain lines of physics experiment despite there being strong reasons to believe them to be very promising if not essential lines of experiment. Some such hopeful lines of experiment considered here identified as early as the 1960s seem still to have had no work done on them and there is maybe not much more time here for this.)