Reading the statement " 1How did he know? Newton was a very great man: he wrote, "Because I can polish glass". You might wonder, how the heck could he tell that because you can polish glass, it can't be holes and spots? Newton polished his own lenses and mirrors, and he knew what he was doing with polishing: he was making scratches on the surface of a piece of glass with powders of increasing fineness. As the scratches became finer and finer, the surface of the glass changes its appearance from a dull gray (because light is scatter by the large scratches), to a transparent clarity (because the extremely fine scratches let the light through). Thus he saw that it is impossible to accept the proposition that light can be affected by very small irregularities such as scratches or holes and spots; in fact, he found the contrary to be true. The finest scratches and therefore equally small spots do not affect the light. So the holes and spots theory is no good. 11 tons that are not aimed right by putting a few extra layers of glass between the source and the first layer of glass. After going through the filters, the photons reaching the glass should all be aimed right, and none of them should reflect. The trouble with that theory is, it doesn't agree with experiment: even after going through many layers of glass, 4% of the photons reaching a given surface reflect off it. Try as we might to invent a reasonable theory that can explain how a photon "makes up its mind" whether to go through glass or bounce back, it is impossible to predict which way a given photon will go. Philosophers have said that if the same circumstances don't always produce the same results, predictions are impossible and science will collapse. Here is a circumstance - identical photons are always coming down in the same direction to the same piece of glass - that produces different results. We cannot predict whether a given photon will arrive at A or B. All we can predict is that out of 100 photons that come down, an average of 4 will be reflected by the front surface. Does this mean that physics, a science of great exactitude, has been reduced to calculating only the probability of an event, and not predicting exactly what will happen? Yes. That's a retreat, but that's the way it is: Nature permits us to calculate only probabilities. Yet science has not collapsed. While partial reflection by a single surface is a deep mystery and a difficult problem, partial reflection by two or more surfaces is absolutely mind-boggling. Let me show you why. We'll do the second experiment, in which we will measure the partial reflection of light by two surfaces. We replace the block of glass with a very thin sheet of glass - its two surfaces are exactly parallel to each other - and we place the photomultiplier below the sheet of glass, in line with the light source. This time, photons can reflect from either the front surface or the back surface to end up at A; all the others will end up at B (see Fig. 4). "

InQED: The Strange Theory of Light, Richard Feynman wrote, "Nature permits us to calculate only probabilities. Yet science has not collapsed."

What does Feynman mean? Do scientific investigations lead to absolute truth? Or, is "truth" merely probabilistic? How do you think this is handle by statisticians?