Scientific hypotheses can rarely be proved true by the data

"The central role of induction in science is sometimes obscured by the way we talk. For example, you might read a newspaper report that says that scientists have found 'experimental proof that genetically modified maize is safe for humans. What this means is that the scientists have tested the maize on a large number of humans, and none of them have come to any harm. But strictly speaking this doesn't prove that the maize is safe, in the sense in which mathematicians can prove Pythagoras' theorem, say. For the inference from 'the maize didn't harm any of the people on whom it was tested' to 'the maize will not harm anyone' is inductive, not deductive. The newspaper report should really have said that scientists have found extremely good evidence that the maize is safe for humans. The word 'proof should strictly only be used when we are dealing with deductive inferences. In this strict sense of the word, scientific hypotheses can rarely, if ever, be proved true by the data."