Real experts use those words a lot. It reflects the fact that in science, we are delving into areas no human ever before has ever studied. So we have no road map, nothing and no one to tell us we are right or wrong. All we have is the process of experimentation guided by theory, which allows us to triangulate on the truth, but it is very difficult to know that we have actually reached it. Thus, we use those words a lot.
A sure sign of a charlatan is someone who claims to have absolute certainty about a subject about which the majority of scientists express uncertainty.
“A sure sign of a charlatan is someone who claims to have absolute certainty about a subject about which the majority of scientists express uncertainty.”
A friend of mine who heads the physics department at the local college and has lectured at Fermilab told me once that any scientific theory should be prefaced with the statement “at our present level of ignorance we assume that......”
Mark Twain