Yes, they can. I was having this debate with Pawel recently and he said that an object will always attract with a force of Gmm/r2. This has never proven to be wrong. Newtonian mechanics is still used in order to construct bridges, buildings, and calculate mechanicas of everyday things. It has never been proven to be wrong.
To say they are just “theoies” is a lazy new-ager argument. In science a theory is a model that best explains all observable facts in the world and can predict non unobservable facts. Quantum Mechanics not only explains all the observable facts in the world it also predicted many non observable facts which have all been empirically validated later. It is a vigorously tested theory and the most succesfull in the history of science, predicting things with the accuracy of a trillionth of a part.
Science does not assume it knows the truth. Science does not seek truth or certainty. No science theory can be proven with certainty. Facts, being the worlds data, involve not only testable elements but also involve interpretation. So, in science there is nothing certain. Because a theory is accepted as correct doesn’t mean it is infallibly certain. Facts, like theories are not certainties.
Science actually does seek truth or certainty, I don’t know who told you it didn’t. Science is certain about the observable world. If were were not certain about it we would not get on a roller coaster, or an aeroplane, just in case the law of conservation of energy was violated and the roller coaster ended up falling of the tracks or the plane ended up falling from the sky. It cannot say anything about the unobservable world, merely make predictions about it.
Quantum mechanics has now shown with a reason of doubt there is no such thing as physical matter. At the atomic level it is mostly empty space, the amount of matter in the universe is the equivalent of one spec in the middle of a large stadium. The rest is empty space. Then at the quantum level even that is negated because there is no space, time or matter beyond the final reduction of space. It then becomes nothing more a wave of possibility or information. And it has now been proven that this information does not become a particle without the observer. Quantum mechanics has been predicting this since the 1930’s, then later the test of the Bell inequalities further confirmed this, and finally today it has been empirically verified that the observer indeed collapses the wavefuncion. So we now without a reason of doubt that the physical world does not really exist without the observer and beyond the physical world reality is non-physical.
