Systematic Observation: Fill & Download for Free

The scientific method:systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses

No, that’s really not the way it works.Suppose you are following a distant galaxy in an accelerating universe. The galaxy is far enough away so that over the eons (many, many billions of years) its speed relative to us is gradually increasing.As a result, you would see that galaxy under increasing redshift, and consequently, everything that happens there will appear in slow motion. It will be harder and harder to observe, because of the increasing distance and increasing redshift (which also further reduces the intensity of its light). But suppose you could nonetheless follow that galaxy for a lot longer (we are now talking trillions of years or more.) The result? You would never see the galaxy disappear. Eventually, its luminosity may fall below the threshold of your instruments, but if your instruments could be improved, the galaxy would reappear. The moment when it would cross your cosmological event horizon remains forever in your future. (That is a common theme with event horizons; after all, they are things in spacetime, not space.)So if we had billions of years at our disposal, we would indeed see the accelerating recession of distant galaxies, but we would never see them cross that horizon.In reality, we have at most a few hundred years of astronomical observations, less than a hundred, really, when it comes to systematic observation of spectra of extragalactic objects. Way too short a time frame to see the acceleration directly. We deduce the acceleration by observing different objects at different distances and redshifts.

Science can never prove why so many people are incapable of understanding that science is in the business of plausibility, not proof.Oh, and science can’t prove anything else, either, because science is in the business of plausibility, not proof.Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment, and Bayesian inference. After an instance of such testing, and idea will usually be either more plausible or less plausible than it was previously.It turns out that if you repeat this process often enough you frequently wind up with ideas that are so much more plausible than everything else that people forget the other, very-low-plausibility ideas are even there, and treat the overwhelmingly-plausible idea as “true” or “certain” or some other equally erroneous way. This is just a common human error due to us all being lazy and stuff.The discipline of science is a way to generate maximally plausible ideas. That is not proof and probably never will be.