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
Analyzing motion problems: total distance traveled | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
Alexi received the following problem: a particle moves in a straight line with velocity v of t is equal to negative t squared plus 8 meters per second, where t is time in seconds. At t is equal to 2, the particle’s distance from the starting point was 5 m…
Jeff Bezos: The electricity metaphor
When you think about resilience and technology, it’s actually much easier. You’re going to see some other speakers today, I already know, who are going to talk about breaking-bones stuff, and, of course, with technology it never is. So it’s very easy, com…
Here’s how you can leverage yourself to have a better work-life balance
Gabby: “Este, and many of you have asked how do you approach the work-life balance? Is it better to spend more time on work, more time on family? I want to emphasize that you can have, uh, the most of both. I found in life that when faced with the proble…
My Life As an Adventure Filmmaker and Photographer (Part 1) | Nat Geo Live
I was just down in Antarctica on a really incredible expedition. We’re doing a climate change story on the wildlife and the conditions, and, uh, a fishing story as well on what’s happening down in Antarctica. The last 5 days of the journey, we crossed th…
Lecture 15 - How to Manage (Ben Horowitz)
So when Sam originally sent me an email to do this course, he said, “Ben, can you teach a 15-minute course on management?” And I immediately thought to myself, wow, I just wrote a 300-page book on management, so that book was entirely too long. And I, I d…
The Call of the Land: Meet The Next Generation of Farmers | Short Film Showcase
Well, there’s no other real choice, is there, but to fix what we have? It’s kind of like you don’t have that much control over what you’re passionate about. We’re not really used to hard work, a lot of people. We didn’t grow up on farms; we didn’t grow wi…