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
Mapping shapes | Performing transformations | High school geometry | Khan Academy
We’re told that triangles. Let’s see, we have triangle PQR and triangle ABC are congruent. The side length of each square on the grid is one unit, so each of these is one unit. Which of the following sequences of transformations maps triangle PQR onto tri…
7 Tips for Motivating Middle School and High School Kids During Distance Learning
Hi everyone, thank you for joining us today on our webinar on seven tips for motivating middle school and high school kids during distance learning. My name is Diane Tiu, and I’ll be kicking us off today as well as moderating our Q&A portion of today’…
The Geo Bee: A 30 Year History | National Geographic
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the first National Geography Bee! Finally, [Applause] anniversaries are important; they are an invitation, in many ways, to look back and celebrate where we’ve been. To have started out as one of over fi…
Facebook Fraud
Have you heard of Virtual Bagel? Their Facebook page has over 4,000 likes. They use the page to promote their brilliant business model: “we send you bagels via the Internet – just download and enjoy.” It sounds like a joke, and it is, sort of. This page w…
Simulation showing value of t statistic | Confidence intervals | AP Statistics | Khan Academy
In a previous video, we talked about trying to estimate a population mean with a sample mean and then constructing a confidence interval about that sample mean. We talked about different scenarios where we could use a z table plus the true population stan…
Introduction to the federal bureaucracy | US government and civics | Khan Academy
We have spent many videos talking about the three branches of government in the United States: the legislative branch, which passes the budgets and makes laws; the executive branch, which runs the government; and the judicial branch, that determines wheth…