Scientific facts, historical facts

The possibility of repeating an experiment is one of the fundamental principles of the scientific method. No discovery is considered final until it has been confirmed by an independent team or researcher. If this happens, it becomes part of the scientific heritage. It follows, therefore, that a fact can only be considered scientific if it can be reproduced.

Historical facts are treated in a very different way. Documents describing the event are sought to confirm that it actually happened. Those documents are analyzed to estimate their degree of credibility. A historical fact will be more credible as a function of the number of independent documents that tell about it. The assassination of Julius Caesar is a well-documented historical fact, but it is not scientific, as it cannot be reproduced.

The origin of life is an event that most likely happened only once in Earth's history. It is impossible to repeat it, so as to study how it happened, therefore it is not a scientific fact. It is a historical fact.

What would be the documents, in the case of the origin of life? Fossil remains. But it is practically impossible to find them. Therefore, the origin of life will most likely be an insoluble problem forever.

But what if one day we make synthetic life in the laboratory? Wouldn’t we know then how the origin of life took place? Well no, for we wouldn’t be sure that the way in which we had made synthetic life were the same as when it appeared spontaneously, a few hundred million years after the origin of the Earth.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca