Aristotle was a philosopher, not a scientist. He was a skilled observer in biology, but his physics was completely wrong in almost every major point. He did NOT test his ideas using actual observations in a systematic way.
I'm not convinced that's true. It's clear that he observed things as you yourself note. He seems to have performed anatomical dissections. He opened up fertilized bird's eggs at various points to examine the fetal development within. So why should we believe that he had no hypotheses/expectations at the time he performed those observations about what he might find when he did? Humans being what they are, it's reasonable to think that he probably did. Put another way, I'm not convinced that the 'observation'/'experiment' distinction is as clear as we might like.
One reason is that the ancient Greeks had a fundamental distrust in the senses and a disregard for practical, as opposed to theoretical discussion.
That's was probably true in my opinion, but it's just a speculative historical hypothesis that itself would be hard to test. We don't really know what actual progression of steps and procedures the Hellenistic natural scientists like Aristotle and Archimedes, and the members of the Hippocratic medical tradition along with them actually used. All we have today is texts that they, their students, their later followers, their opponents or the doxographers wrote. And more often, we just have small fragments of those texts that later authors quoted, typically out-of-context statements of conclusions. So the way their ideas are presented might be as much a matter of chance and rhetorical convention as it was an indication of how their thought developed and how they actually arrived at their conclusions. The history of ideas is by its very nature highly speculative.
So, do I think the science of 4000AD will be different than ours? Yes, of course.
The question that interests me is how much of our present day science will be retained in the future, and how much will be replaced with something different.
Do I think it will say that planets do not orbit the sun? No, I do not.
We've seen the definition of 'planet' change in recent years, witness astronomers' callous abandonment of sad, forsaken Pluto (with a huge heart on its side crying out 'Please love me!')
Do I think it will say that DNA is NOT the primary source of genetic information? No, I do not.
And do I think that they will say that species are static? No, I do not.
I'm inclined to agree. But it's necessary to note that how 'species' is defined remains controversial. The word is used differently by different biologists and in different areas of biology.
Species concept - Wikipedia
I *do* expect many of the details to change, though.
I think that science is most stable over time at the level of observations. The ancients, medievals, and ourselves probably all would agree that fire is hot, gives off light, requires suitable fuels and so on. Where we differ is the conceptual scheme in which we try to understand what fire is. Is it an element in its own right? Is it the release of some hypothetical 'phlogiston'? Or is it a rapid oxidative exothermic chemical chain reaction?
For example, I expect to see much more information about the *mechanisms* of evolution: how to measure and classify various sorts of selection pressure and being able to predict, at least to some extent, how things will change over time. Sort of a stochastic dynamical system.
Yes. Very likely.
Do I expect that the basic Big Bang scenario will be overthrown? No.
I'm less confident of that one. I expect that the raw data of cosmological red shifts to still be acknowledged in the future. But future thinkers might be less prone than we are to interpret it as expansion of the universe or to extrapolate backwards to a singularity.
In other words, I expect the future to still recognize that our basic observations are good, but the future might understand those observations differently, in terms of different larger explanatory schemes.
But I would not at all be surprised if it becomes a fairly small part of a much larger perspective. Sort of like what happened with our understanding of the solar system when we discovered the existence of our galaxy and others.
Yes, I expect that too. But things like multiverse theories will be awfully hard to test, so they might never rise above being speculative hypotheses.
And, of course, to some extent we can't even guess what direction things will go. What will be the burning scientific debate? No idea. What problems will they find themselves addressing? No idea. What *branches* of knowledge will be most active? No idea.
Agree entirely.
I'd bet the situation will be sort of like bringing one of the first agriculturalists to today to see a farm. The basic of planting seeds to get crops is still there, but there is *so* much more going on.
Yes. What agriculturalists are doing today takes place in a very different conceptual context than that possessed by the very first farmers.