Future theories must reproduce current experimental results unchanged.

Evidence

The fact that the state of science always has something provisional does not mean that there are no assured findings either. Probably, no hopefully, today’s central theories of physics, the quantum theories and the theory of relativity, will eventually be replaced by new, more comprehensive concepts. But these new concepts must give the same results in practically all subjects experimentally accessible today as our current theories, because by a new theory the reality does not become different and the experiments will not have different results. Also the quantum theories and the theory of relativity do not yield different results on things which could be measured at the time of classical mechanics, than classical mechanics itself does. — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 782

Categorization

• XREF: This is the correspondence principle — echoes earlier discussion of scientific theory change and the provisionality of physics knowledge.

Related

• Scientific findings are provisional intermediate states that may later prove wrong (similarity 0.81)
• Without empirical refutation of either general relativity or quantum mechanics, it is the incommensurability between the theories that has most driven theoretical physics forward. (similarity 0.80)
• Unified physics theories may require multiple formulations. (similarity 0.80)