[Stevie Bain (OP)]

David says:

I would like to thank 'The Naked Scientists ' for the informative, educational and amusing way they portray science. It is most certainly a school of learning where knowledge of our world, life and the Universe is enhanced to new levels of understanding and humility.

Like evolution, science is always progressing and developing into new fields of understanding and enlightenment, almost taking the proportions of religion in terms of educating us beyond the limits of our own understanding. However, unlike religion, science projects its knowledge based on known facts, and not on the complexity of the lack of understanding - a state of mind which causes more questions than answers.

[evan_au]

...science projects its knowledge based on known facts, and not on the complexity of the lack of understanding - a state of mind which causes more questions than answers.

It may look like that to an outsider.

But the reality is that for every confirmed scientific discovery, there are are often 10 or more things that didn't work - often for no obvious reason.

And every discovery usually prompts several other questions, so in a sense, the more you know, the more you know you don't know.

I don't really mind people who know that there are things they don't understand.
The ones that scare me are the ones who think they know everything!

[unstman]

I totally agree, Evan.

Science, to a fashion, can be a process of ' trial by error ' but in saying this, many inventions are based on theories, and, if possible, putting theory into practice. I suspect many new inventions require a little tweaking here and there? However, the irony of the invention can also be vastly improved as new methods and techniques are discovered and subsequent improvements made..........electronics being a good example of this.

A casing point would be the invention of the television : the principle of how it works and the designed it takes as a result of the processes involved in producing a moving image onto a flat or slightly curved surface (the cathode ray tube).

In saying this, you cannot credit  John Logie Baird, for inventing the flat screen television - a prime example of where technology has superseded the main principle invention. Is a flat screen television a completely new invention, despite still being called a television? 

[alancalverd]

Flat screens aren't the point. The fundamental concept of television is to encode a two-dimensional image into a serial data stream, transmit it, and reconstitute an image at the receiver.  Historically I think Nipkow deserves credit for the image scanning concept and Baird for demonstrating a "practical" application including broadcast transmission, even though the Baird system was quickly superseded by the EMI process. However you view the final image today, it's still generated and reconstituted by a raster scan and transmitted as a serial data stream. 

[Bored chemist]

"A casing point would be the invention of the television : the principle of how it works and the designed it takes as a result of the processes involved in producing a moving image onto a flat or slightly curved surface (the cathode ray tube)."
A couple of things;
 the original used a neon lamp and mechanical scanning, rather than a CRT.
Also.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/case_in_point

It's an interesting point about science; it only progresses by failing.
The things that work are the things that technology goes on to make use of.
But an experiment can't scientifically prove a theory to be right it can only show that it is wrong (if the theory fails to predict the experimental outcome).
So, we only get better theories  if the old ones are found to be wrong.