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
The Shadow | Why We’re More Evil Than We Think
It seems like in current society we are excessively concerned with our self-image. But, even though we might think we’ve figured ourselves out, is this really the case? Or are we just showing the world - and ourselves - a mere reflection of who we truly a…
Slow Motion Flipping Cat Physics | Smarter Every Day 58
Hey, it’s me Destin. Welcome back to SmarterEveryDay! So you’ve probably observed that cats almost always land on their feet. Today’s question is why. Like most simple questions, there’s a very complex answer. For instance, let me reword this question: H…
Why Do People Act Badly? | The Story of God
In small-scale societies and ancestral communities, there were only a couple of hundred individuals. It was relatively easy to keep tabs on one another, and that was really important because social reputation matters. The problem is that the larger the s…
Indigenous Art in Canada | National Geographic
If you want to travel through indigenous country, experience the art. Whether it’s a painting, whether it’s a sculpture, whether it’s a song, every piece is the embodiment of a story. The art is the land, and the land is the art. This is how we share our …
Relating unit rate to slope in graphs of proportional relationships | Grade 8 (TX) | Khan Academy
A farmer sold 26 kg of tomatoes for $78. Which graph has a slope that represents the cost of tomatoes in dollars per kilogram? Pause this video, work through this on your own before we do this together. So, if we’re thinking about slope, slope is all ab…
Peasant Revolts | World History | Khan Academy
In this video, I want to look at popular uprisings in late medieval Europe. So we’re talking about between roughly the 14th and the 16th centuries. These are sometimes known as peasants’ revolts, and we’ll talk a little later about whether or not that’s a…