When an apple falls from a tree, we accept it has fallen.

@dale74 Look...

We accept gravity without demanding absolute certainty for every apple that falls. Yet when it comes to vaccines and autism - despite dozens of studies, millions of participants, and decades of consistent evidence showing NO causal link - some still say 'but you can't be 100% sure.'

Science doesn't deal in absolute certainties, but it does reach points where the evidence is so overwhelming that moving the goalposts becomes denial, not skepticism. Just as we don't question whether the next apple might fall sideways, we have enough evidence to confidently state that vaccines don't cause autism.

The real question isn't whether we can be 100% certain (we never can be about anything). It's whether we have enough evidence to make informed decisions. And on this question, the answer is unequivocally yes.

When we demand impossible standards of proof for well-established science, we're not being cautious - we're being unreasonable. And in the case of vaccines, that unreasonableness has real consequences for public health.

Climate change is the same.

@G7J2O they said that the covid vaccine was safe.Now they're finding all types of issues with it, causing blood clots.And that was less than five years ago.

I do not have a problem with the longstanding traditional vaccines that we give children, but I also believe that it should be a family's choice.

@Cyclist In an abstract philosophical sense, Newton has been supplanted by general relativity. However, Newton is still used by NASA and others for most calculations. Even though it's philosophically imperfect, its errors are smaller than most of the other errors encountered in practical space navigation.

@ElwoodBlues actually, the effects of general relativity in everyday life are very real. Much of modern technology would not exist without taking GR into account as more than just a philosophical concept, which it is not. Here are a few examples:
The most obvious example is GPS navigation. GPS works by measuring light travel time and time stamps among at least 3 satellites. Clocks on GPS satellites tick faster by about 38 micro-seconds per day. The difference in Doppler shift is about 0.21 meters/second. Over one day, the positions to each satellite would be off by about 6 miles, and the entire system would crash.
Another example is the worldwide synchronization of telecommunication systems. These systems can carry so much data in part because they know to very high precision when data are arriving in a new subsystem. Due to time ticking at different rates at different altitudes on Earth and in space, that requires a general relativistic correction. Slightly related, electricity transmission losses are minimized when AC currents are precisely in phase. 2 or more power systems can all be operating at 60 Hz, but if the phases of those cycles are not the same, combining th will cause losses. Over very large distances and altitudes, that again requires a GR corrections. NASA spacecraft also use GR corrections, for all the reasons discussed here. If GPS, in Earth orbit, would accumulate a 10 km error over a day, then imagine what it would be like for New Horizons traveling 10 years to get to Pluto.

@SumKindaMunster Oh, I see that J7G20 has already improved your understanding.


To echo J7G20's remark' that makes no sense.


It's not the quantity of evidence that counts but its robustness and explanatory power.