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
A Traveling Circus and its Great Escape | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic
So, as I was driving around, I just noticed the big red and yellow big top in the distance, in the middle of essentially a paralyzed, frozen entire city. When I saw it, I thought to myself, “Well, I wonder what they’re doing?” That’s photographer Tomas S…
Change in centripetal acceleration from change in linear velocity and radius: Worked examples
We are told that a van drives around a circular curve of radius r with linear speed v. On a second curve of the same radius, the van has linear speed one third v. You could view linear speed as the magnitude of your linear velocity. How does the magnitud…
Working at Big Tech Companies Can Be a Trap - Michael Seibel
Hello, my name is Michael Seibel. I’m a CEO and partner at Y Combinator. Before YC, I was co-founder of a company called Justin.tv that later became Twitch and sold to Amazon, and another company called Socialcam which sold to Autodesk. One of the most c…
1984 Tried To Warn You
Thank you. This is a YouTube video from the future. It’s 2030. Privacy is dead, and we’re happier than ever. Security cameras, dash cams, monitors, laptops, smartphones, even glasses—there are telescreens, sorry, cameras everywhere and we love them. We ca…
Enterprise Sales | Startup School
[Music] My name is Pete Kuman. I’m a group partner at YC and a YC Alum. I was co-founder and CTO of Optimizely in the winter 2010 batch. In this talk, I’m going to walk step by step through the process of closing your first Enterprise customers. I’m goin…
Live for Today. Hope for Tomorrow.
Once there was a Chinese farmer who had a horse that he would tend his crops with every morning. One day, out of the blue, the horse ran off. All the villagers approached the farmer and offered their sympathies. “My, what bad luck you’ve had,” they echoe…