Is there a scientific way to prove that something is impossible?

Ha! If I said it was impossible for science to do that, how could I possibly not be caught up in the contradiction of my own words?

Science is for proving positives, not negatives. I can push reindeer off buildings till I wipe out the entire species and still will not have proven that reindeer can’t actually fly. It could be that at thoe particular time I tested, they just didn’t want to fly.

Anything that hasn’t happened wasn’t possible.
This is a fact.

First you must ask yourself: Is it possible to prove something impossible? What if its not possible to prove that something is impossible? Quite the paradox…

The Catholic church attempts to do this in my opinion. When they are deciding whether something is a miracle the church looks to science to prove it should not have happened as we understand nature, and so whatever the event was that happened outside of nature is considered miraculous. A miracle basically means it is impossible in a way.

I have always wondered how many miracles declared by the church hundreds of years ago can now be explained in present day with our more advanced understanding of science.

Oh my, I hadn’t even noticed that little paradox I was creating. Funny!

@ETpro “Science is for proving positives, not negatives” That pretty much sums up what I figured was probably the case.

@ninjacolin Can I ask you to defend that statement?? Tomorrow someone will ask a question on fluther.com that has never been asked before, does that mean today it is impossible to ask that question??

It’s all about statistical probability. If you let an apple go, it will fall to the ground. If you’re going to let a billion apples go, a billion apples will fall to the ground. You can let a Googol of apples fall, and they will all fall to the ground. Is it POSSIBLE that an apple will fall up? Sure. But the overwhelming statistical probability is that the apples will all fall down.

So I would say that yes, you can prove something is impossible.

Ah, never mind, I see where you were taking that thought, @ninjacolin. Not gonna get into a determinism debate on this thread, though.

@Rarebear But you even said in your answer that it was possible that the apple may fall up, it would take a very odd and unlikely set of circumstances, sure, but how can we say it is impossible just because it hasn’t happened yet? Though I do understand your statement about probability – for all intents and purposes, it is impossible, we don’t go about our lives fearing being smacked under the chin by a rising apple.

@Rarebear It’s fair to say we can prove something with a degree of certainty approximating perfectin. So we would all think it impossible for an ordinary apple held slightly above the Earth with nothing resisting gravitational pull on it to fall up. But we do not know how gravity works. We don’t know that at some point in the development of the Universe, mass attraction won’t suddenly become mass repulsion; at which point all apples would fall up, as would the people holding them and preparing to drop them. So we aren’t 100% certain even that gravity sucks. Someday it might blow.

We can only say with a very high (but not absolute) degree of certainty that various thangs are the way things work in the Universe as it exists today and within the past we are able to observe.

@Mariah said: “Can I ask you to defend that statement?? Tomorrow someone will ask a question on fluther.com that has never been asked before, does that mean today it is impossible to ask that question??”

No debate necessary. It’s a matter of the terms we’re using. Clearly, the only questions that could be asked today are the ones that will be asked today. If it were possible for a question to be asked today, it would be asked today.

Clearly, if I’m lacking the ambition to ask a question, then I cannot ask a question since having the ambition was a requirement for my asking.

What else would “possible” mean besides.. “possible”

Proofs are only possible within a stipulated context.

The impossible math maneuver is only impossible in the context of the math problem that frames it, and with the math that’s available to the problem. Some math problems, for instance, are impossible without using fractions, or irrational numbers, or imaginary numbers… each of which took generations of mathematicians to come up with.

@ninjacolin True, I agree with you in regards to possibility of past events. The debate would arise if we extended the concept to future events – is the future fixed like the past, is there only one set of possible events, or are there many? My intended meaning of “impossible” for this question is never possible. I’m increasingly realizing, reading these answers, that it would be quite an arrogant assertation to claim that anything will NEVER be possible.

It is impossible to reanimate the dead, not just speaking on those who’s heart has stopped a time, but those who are dead, no brain function, heart stopped more than an hour, rigor mortis and all. The evidence is quite clear there is a force stat keeps humans alive and animals too, but all the science can’t isolate it or even quantify what it is. They will never be able to duplicate it no matter if they have 10,000 year. Even if it is about proving than finding negatives they will never solve that one.

@Mariah, I agree.

I don’t think I will ever be a girl though.
I feel like I can tell.

@Hypocrisy_Central Is that assertation based on anything but faith? That is not proof of impossibility.

@ninjacolin Nope, probably not. Who knows though, maybe you’ll be in a car crash and suffer brain damage and be in a coma and then wake up wanting nothing more than sex reassignment surgery, which you will then seek out. Hope not, bud. Disclaimer: I’m not saying transgendered people are brain damaged.

@Hypocrisy_Central I maintain just the opposite. It may someday prove possible to reanimate the dead. We don’t know how to do that today, but that’s no proof we will never learn. If you had told an ancient Greek philosopher that we would someday dig up rocks and be able to generate massive amounts of power from them, enough to blow an entire mountain to pieces, because the rocks are radioactive and we can cause their tiny pieces of the constituent atoms to collide in such a way as to set off a chain reaction, I do not expect he would have believed you. To his understanding of the nature of matter, particle physics would seem absurd.

Likewise, we today have no way of predicting what science will be unable to fathom in the future. The most comical productions we can read are those of scientists and men of learning from the past predicting what would and wouldn’t be possible in the future.

Mathematics is a deductive science, so proof of impossibility is… possible. You can use techniques such as reductio ad absurdum or more specifically, proof by contradiction, to disprove the existence of a mathematical claim.

However, fields which require the scientific method, such as biology and chemistry, cannot have universal assumptions made unless the claim is tested universally.

Here’s a fun read about the topic. Notice only mathematical claims are mentioned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_impossibility

@Vortico Oooh, thank you! I should probably have been asleep 2 hours ago but I’ll read that in more detail tomorrow.

I agree with @ETpro.

Also, I think it’s potentially harmful to declare things impossible. Maybe say instead, seems very unlikely; because there’s always something you haven’t tested for, always an exception to the rule. Leave in that 1% or so of openness, just in case we don’t know everything.

I wish I had the full article online, this summary isn’t any substance, but here (sort of) is an article on mathematics with more dimensions than what we’ve worked with so far—that scientists and mathematicians are actually bumping up against limits we drew, limits that aren’t perhaps all too real.

And, i, annoyingly necessary in higher mathematics, fits in here—that it’s not really imaginary, despite what we’ve named it. Impossible only by our current, flatter, understanding.

He is talking about a math formula. But, generally, in science we talk about probabilities, not complete absolues. Sending a man to the moon in 1920 was improbable, but we did it in 1969.

Math speaking in real terms, we don´t get 1+1 to equal anything but 2 and there are math equations that are simply that. Equations for the display of a problem with no absolute answer for the variable therein. With math, we often need more information in order to come to an absolute answer and formula display an idea, rather than a finite possible answer.

There are many impossibility proofs in mathematics; the possibility in question is logical possibility, so no new method or discovery will ever yield a different result. Here are a couple of quick references: impossible geometric constructions and impossibility proofs.

Don’t know about scientific proof but I do know that it’s impossible to kiss your own elbow (while it’s still attached to you).

You cant eat the Himalayas, a couple of basic measurements and calculations will show this.

Proving the non existence of a god is totally different, we are dealing with the abstract, subjective, and a battle of deffinitions.

Sience may not be able to prove everything or anything to be impossible, but with my limited knowledge I would say It can certainly prove some things.

Within the domain of mathematics, it is possible to prove some things are impossible.
The definitions of things constrain the possibilities.

@chewhorse I know someone who can!

Thanks everyone for seconding that this is indeed possible in the context of mathematics.

@chewhorse You can kiss my Ability to Search Sufficiently for someone who can kiss their own elbow.

Quantum mechanics has proceeded in large part through experiments that rule out the existence of hypothetical particles. So in that sense, yeah.

I think there are different strengths of the word “proof” that scientists work with depending on their discipline. At the most fundamental physics it’s basically math, so proof works in a very discreet, mathematical sense. But as we move up the ladder to chemistry, biology, and sociology, “proof” takes on a fuzzier, more everyday meaning (much like how lawyers must “prove” a person is guilty by putting forth evidence and a theory-like framework to best explain the facts). I do think such scientific proofs can be said to rule out the existence of things—for example, viruses that caused the massive late-Cretaceuous dinosaur extinctions.

Yes. For example by using so-called proofs by contradiction.