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
Photosynthesis | Energy and matter in biological systems | High school biology | Khan Academy
Hey everybody! Dr. Sammy here, your friendly neighborhood entomologist. Today, we’re going to talk about photosynthesis. There’s very little life on this planet that could exist without photosynthesis. It is the prerequisite for pretty much everything yo…
Worked example: over- and under-estimation of Riemann sums | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
The continuous function ( g ) is graphed. We’re interested in the area under the curve between ( x ) equals negative seven and ( x ) equals seven, and we’re considering using Riemann sums to approximate it. So, this is the area that we’re thinking about i…
6 NEW Stocks Warren Buffett is Buying!
Warren Buffett runs the most closely followed portfolio in all of investing. Put simply, when Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, starts buying up stock in a certain company, people pay attention. I frequently say that probably the best way to learn ab…
Using a P-value to make conclusions in a test about slope | AP Statistics | Khan Academy
Alicia took a random sample of mobile phones and found a positive linear relationship between their processor speeds and their prices. Here is computer output from a least squares regression analysis on her sample. So just to be clear what’s going on: sh…
PSA: Why it’s a BAD IDEA to pay down your mortgage early!
It’s because of these reasons that’s exactly why I will never pay down my mortgage early. If I have a 30-year loan, I will be making the bare minimum payments and just investing the difference versus ever putting an extra dime towards paying down that loa…
Adventures in Photographing England's Urban Wildlife | Nat Geo Live
I’m always trying to look for flagship species, talismans to represent whole ecosystems. If you wanna photograph the Arctic, you photograph polar bears. If you wanna photograph Africa, you photograph lions. Well, you can have a wildlife experience in a ci…