Demarcation between Science and Non Sense

 All of us have a certain point of view or opinion towards things in life, we have certain beliefs, and we all like to think that we are rational and our views are justified. We have also seen people who fail to accept that they are wrong and end up in a sorry state, this happens frequently in stock markets where people get married to their stock positions and hold them till the losses recover, lots of companies become relics of the past because they fail to adapt to the current situation , sticking to what has worked in past can not work forever in a ever changing world.

A theory can be said to be rational or scientific if and only if it presents conditions that would falsify it. Your views and opinions about any topic are rational if you don't continue to believe in them blindly even after the facts show otherwise, if you continue to believe irrespective of anything then the knowledge is not scientific. Newtonian Physics is scientific because we know the limits of the domain it works in , astrology is not because astrologers would come up with statements like "Yes the saturn was looking at venus but so was jupiter" astrologers come up with auxiliary arguments to justify their science. This is the demarcation between science and non sense. 

Also I would like to say that Science should not be taken so seriously, let me propose a scientific theory:

All swans are white.

You go out and observe the nature (Physics is observing nature's events) and see the swans that you find are all white. So it gets accepted as a scientific theory, but no number of white swans observed can prove this theory but one black swan is sufficient to disprove it.  

 

(Black Swan (Cygnus atratus) was discovered in south east and south west parts of Australia)

You might say that my theory lacked scientific rigor of conducting controlled experiments but this is how newtonian physics was disproved by observation of quantum mechanics , that it was falsified at quantum scale. 

Philosopher Karl Popper proposed that there are only two kinds of theories:

1. Theories that have been proved to be incorrect whose counter events have been observed. 

2.  Theories that have not been proved to incorrect (yet) but are open to falsification.

He claims that knowledge can not be verified, but only be disproved.

The takeaway is that one needs to be confident but extremely critical of one's own ideas. Skepticism should be accompanied with willingness and curiosity to accept alternative hypotheses. Knee jerk dismissiveness is a recipe for disaster.