Scientific consensus in the context of Fact

Empirical evidence is evidence obtained through sense experience or experimental procedure. It is of central importance to the sciences and plays a role in various other fields, like epistemology and law.

There is no general agreement on how the terms evidence and empirical are to be defined. Often different fields work with quite different conceptions. In epistemology, evidence is what justifies beliefs or what determines whether holding a certain belief is rational. This is only possible if the evidence is possessed by the person, which has prompted various epistemologists to conceive evidence as private mental states like experiences or other beliefs. In philosophy of science, on the other hand, evidence is understood as that which confirms or disconfirms scientific hypotheses and arbitrates between competing theories. For this role, evidence must be public and uncontroversial, like observable physical objects or events and unlike private mental states, so that evidence may foster scientific consensus. The term empirical comes from Greek ἐμπειρία empeiría, i.e. 'experience'. In this context, it is usually understood as what is observable, in contrast to unobservable or theoretical objects. It is generally accepted that unaided perception constitutes observation, but it is disputed to what extent objects accessible only to aided perception, like bacteria seen through a microscope or positrons detected in a cloud chamber, should be regarded as observable.

This list includes well-known general theories in science and pre-scientific natural history and natural philosophy that have since been superseded by other scientific theories. Many discarded explanations were once supported by a scientific consensus, but replaced after more empirical information became available that identified flaws and prompted new theories which better explain the available data. Pre-modern explanations originated before the scientific method, with varying degrees of empirical support.

Some scientific theories are discarded in their entirety, such as the replacement of the phlogiston theory by energy and thermodynamics. Some theories known to be incomplete or in some ways incorrect are still used. For example, Newtonian classical mechanics is accurate enough for practical calculations at everyday distances and velocities, and it is still taught in schools. The more complicated relativistic mechanics must be used for long distances and velocities nearing the speed of light, and quantum mechanics for very small distances and objects.

There is scientific consensus that the Earth has been consistently warming since the start of the Industrial Revolution, that the rate of recent warming is largely unprecedented, and that this warming is mainly the result of a rapid increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) caused by human activities. The human activities causing this warming include fossil fuel combustion, cement production, and land use changes such as deforestation, with a significant supporting role from the other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. This human role in climate change is considered "unequivocal" and "incontrovertible".

Nearly all actively publishing climate scientists say humans are causing climate change. Surveys of the scientific literature are another way to measure scientific consensus. A 2019 review of scientific papers found the consensus on the cause of climate change to be at 100%, and a 2021 study concluded that over 99% of scientific papers agree on the human cause of climate change. The small percentage of papers that disagreed with the consensus often contained errors or could not be replicated.

Emotions are physical and mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is no scientific consensus on a definition. Emotions are often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, or creativity.

Research on emotion has increased over the past two decades, with many fields contributing, including psychology, medicine, history, sociology of emotions, computer science and philosophy. The numerous attempts to explain the origin, function, and other aspects of emotions have fostered intense research on this topic. Theorizing about the evolutionary origin and possible purpose of emotion dates back to Charles Darwin. Current areas of research include the neuroscience of emotion, using tools like PET and fMRI scans to study the affective picture processes in the brain.

A non-standard cosmology is any physical cosmological model of the universe that was, or still is, proposed as an alternative to the then-current standard model of cosmology. The term non-standard is applied to any theory that does not conform to the scientific consensus. Because the term depends on the prevailing consensus, the meaning of the term changes over time. For example, hot dark matter would not have been considered non-standard in 1990, but would have been in 2010. Conversely, a non-zero cosmological constant resulting in an accelerating universe would have been considered non-standard in 1990, but is part of the standard cosmology in 2010.

Several major cosmological disputes have occurred throughout the history of cosmology. One of the earliest was the Copernican Revolution, which established the heliocentric model of the Solar System. More recent was the Great Debate of 1920, in the aftermath of which the Milky Way's status as but one of the Universe's many galaxies was established. From the 1940s to the 1960s, the astrophysical community was equally divided between supporters of the Big Bang theory and supporters of a rival steady state universe; this is currently decided in favour of the Big Bang theory by advances in observational cosmology in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, there remained vocal detractors of the Big Bang theory including Fred Hoyle, Jayant Narlikar, Halton Arp, and Hannes Alfvén, whose cosmologies were relegated to the fringes of astronomical research. The few Big Bang opponents still active today often ignore well-established evidence from newer research, and as a consequence, today non-standard cosmologies that reject the Big Bang entirely are rarely published in peer-reviewed science journals but appear online in marginal journals and private websites.

The problem of philosophical objectivity is contrasted with personal subjectivity, sometimes exacerbated by the overgeneralization of a hypothesis to the whole. For example, Newton's law of universal gravitation appears to be the norm for the attraction between celestial bodies, but it was later refined and extended—and philosophically superseded—by the more general theory of relativity.

Non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS) or gluten sensitivity is a disorder which can cause both gastrointestinal and other problems.

NCGS is included in the spectrum of gluten-related disorders. The definition and diagnostic criteria of non-celiac gluten sensitivity were debated and established by three consensus conferences. However, as of 2019, there remained much debate in the scientific community as to whether NCGS was a distinct clinical disorder.

In the sciences and in historiography, denialism is the rejection of basic facts and concepts that are undisputed, well-supported parts of the scientific consensus or historical record on a subject, in favor of ideas that are radical, controversial, or fabricated. Examples include Holocaust denial, AIDS denialism, and climate change denial. The forms of denialism present the common feature of the person rejecting overwhelming evidence and trying to generate political controversy in attempts to deny the existence of consensus.

In psychology, denialism is a person's choice to deny reality as a way to avoid believing in an uncomfortable truth. Denialism is an essentially irrational human behavior that withholds the validation of a historical experience or event when a person refuses to accept an empirically verifiable reality.

There is no legal or scientific consensus on the definition of terrorism. Various legal systems and government agencies use different definitions of terrorism, and governments have been reluctant to formulate an agreed-upon legally-binding definition. Difficulties arise from the fact that the term has become politically and emotionally charged. A simple definition proposed to the United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (CCPCJ) by terrorism studies scholar Alex P. Schmid in 1992, based on the already internationally accepted definition of war crimes, as "peacetime equivalents of war crimes", was not accepted.

Scholars have worked on creating various academic definitions, reaching a consensus definition published by Schmid and A. J. Jongman in 1988, with a longer revised version published by Schmid in 2011, some years after he had written that "the price for consensus [had] led to a reduction of complexity". The Cambridge History of Terrorism (2021), however, states that Schmid's "consensus" resembles an intersection of definitions, rather than a bona fide consensus.

Faster-than-light (superluminal or supercausal) travel and communication are the conjectural propagation of matter or information faster than the speed of light in vacuum (c). The special theory of relativity implies that only particles with zero rest mass (i.e., photons) may travel at the speed of light, and that nothing may travel faster.

Particles whose speed exceeds that of light (tachyons) have been hypothesized, but their existence would violate causality and would imply time travel. The scientific consensus is that they do not exist.

Creation science or scientific creationism is a pseudoscientific form of Young Earth creationism which claims to offer scientific arguments for certain literalist and inerrantist interpretations of the Bible. It is often presented without overt faith-based language, but instead relies on reinterpreting scientific results to argue that various myths in the Book of Genesis and other select biblical passages are scientifically valid. The most commonly advanced ideas of creation science include special creation based on the Genesis creation narrative and flood geology based on the Genesis flood narrative. Creationists also claim they can disprove or reexplain a variety of scientific facts, theories and paradigms of geology, cosmology, biological evolution, archaeology, history, and linguistics using creation science. Creation science was foundational to intelligent design.

The overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is that creation science fails to qualify as scientific because it lacks empirical support, supplies no testable hypotheses, and resolves to describe natural history in terms of scientifically untestable supernatural causes. Courts, most often in the United States where the question has been asked in the context of teaching the subject in public schools, have consistently ruled since the 1980s that creation science is a religious view rather than a scientific one. Historians, philosophers of science and skeptics have described creation science as a pseudoscientific attempt to map the Bible into scientific facts. Professional biologists have criticized creation science for being unscholarly, and even as a dishonest and misguided sham, with extremely harmful educational consequences.

Day-age creationism is an interpretation of the creation accounts in Genesis. It holds that the six days referred to in the Genesis account of creation are not literal 24-hour days, but are much longer periods (from thousands to billions of years). The Genesis account is then reconciled with the age of the Earth. Proponents of the day-age theory can be found among both theistic evolutionists, who accept the scientific consensus on evolution, and progressive creationists, who reject it. The theories are said to be built on the understanding that the Hebrew word yom is also used to refer to a time period, with a beginning and an end and not necessarily that of a 24-hour day.

The differences between the young Earth interpretation of Genesis and modern scientific theories believed by some day-age creationists such as the Big Bang, abiogenesis, and common descent are significant. The young Earth interpretation says that everything in the universe and on Earth was created in six 24-hour days, estimated to have occurred some 6,000 years ago. Modern scientific observations, however, put the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years and the Earth at 4.5 billion years, with various forms of life, including humans, being formed gradually over time.

Juglans nigra, the eastern American black walnut, is a species of deciduous tree in the walnut family, Juglandaceae, native to central and eastern North America, growing mostly in riparian zones.

Black walnut is susceptible to thousand cankers disease, which provoked a decline of walnut trees in some regions. Black walnut is allelopathic, releasing chemicals from its roots and other tissues that may harm other organisms and give the tree a competitive advantage, but there is no scientific consensus that this is a primary competitive factor.