yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

We Explain the Seen in Terms of the Unseen


2m read
·Nov 3, 2024

Now people might object at this point and go, "How dare you invoke in science things that cannot be seen, things that cannot be observed? This is completely antagonistic towards the scientific method!"

Surely, and I'll say to anyone who's thinking that right now, almost everything of interest that you know about science is about the unobserved. Let's consider dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are unobserved. You say, "Oh hold on, I've been to the museum, I've seen a dinosaur!"

Now you have seen a fossil, and a fossil isn't even a bone. It's an ossified bone; it has been metamorphosed into rock. So no one has ever seen a dinosaur. We have seen things that look like dinosaurs and interpreted them to be huge, reptilian, bird-like creatures. When we assemble their skeletons, we make up a story about what this thing was that walked the Earth tens or hundreds of millions of years ago.

In the same way, no one has ever seen the core of the sun, and no one will ever observe the core of the sun. But we know about stellar fusion. We know that hydrogen nuclei are being crushed together there to form helium, and in the process, producing heat.

We don't see the big bang. We don't see the movement of continents. Almost everything of interest in science we do not observe. Even many of the things that we say we have seen, we've actually just seen instruments detect those things. So we're watching the effects through instruments and then theorizing that there are other universes out there, where the photons are interacting with the photons that we can see.

More Articles

View All
Arrogance & Pride in Stoicism | Q&A #4 | June 2019
Hello everyone, welcome to the QA of June 2019. How are you all doing? Man, oh man, it’s been so hot the last few days in the Netherlands! I understand why they take afternoon naps in some warmer countries, because when it’s above 30 degrees outside, you …
Changes in labor supply | Microeconomics | Khan Academy
In a previous video, we took a look at the labor markets, and we thought about it in the context of the entire market and how it might impact a firm. So let’s say that all of a sudden, the nation’s immigration policy changes where they’re willing to bring…
3 Stoic Ways To Be Happy
Many people these days are concerned with achieving a happy life but often lack the skills and knowledge to do so. Luckily, thousands of years ago, the old Stoics already figured out how to suffer less and enjoy more with a system of exercises, wisdom, an…
The Most Powerful Computers You've Never Heard Of
In 1901, this ancient Greek artifact was discovered in a shipwreck off the island of Antikythera. 3D x-ray scans have revealed it contains 37 interlocking bronze gears, allowing it to model the motions of the sun and moon, and predict eclipses decades in …
Conceptual overview of light dependent reactions
We’ve seen in previous videos that photosynthesis can be broken down into the light dependent reactions and the Calvin cycle. The light dependent reactions is where we take light as an input along with water, and we’ll see the water is actually a source o…
Dear 2022
I don’t know if it’s just me, but it’s basically 2022 now, and I’m still mentally processing 2020. When I think back about 2021 and what it did for me as a person, it doesn’t feel like much of anything new, just a rehash of last year. It’s like they’ve me…