NANOTEC said:
And that was my point, it makes "predictions" aka "a guess" based on what is "observable". What about the things that can't be observed? Isn't that half the equation? Even then it's only things we can observe within out own self developed methods. Also observing is one thing, explaining is another.
If something can't be observed in principle, then it is unscientific. If it can't be observed for technical reasons (your particle accelerator ain't strong enough, your telescope isn't good enough), it becomes a gray area with two possibilities. 1) observation is technically feasible and within reasonable time horizons 2) observation is technically not feasible.
If observation is technically feasible, we may permit the theory, and await future tests. For example, Einstein's General Theory of Relativity made many predictions, only some were immediately testable, while others still haven't been tested directly (graviation waves via LIGO. Yes, they have been 'detected' indirectly via decaying orbits of binary stars)
But it may be that observation is technically infeasible on any reasonable timescale. For example, if you have to build a linear particle accelerator the size of a galaxy (to test some Grand Unified Theories) or destroy a star, or wait 10 billion years, then the theory is in a gray area of science, that many people would say is unscientific.
Today, Quantum Gravity theories are criticized by many as perhaps untestable even if one could come up with one that is consistent with all known predictions. Because such theories make additional predictions on energy, time, and space scales that are for all practical purposes, inaccessible to us. So they sit half-way between physical science and pure mathematics.
Science is about building models. Building models is the best you can possibly do. It's what our brains do. We process perceptions and build an internal model based on those perceptions used for future predictions. But the Map is not the Territory. A description of something is not necessary what something *IS*. The difference between science and our "folk" intuition of the world, is that given any two human beings X and Y, they may have different ideas of the meanings of various words, and they are a fallible.
So it is not sufficient for person X to propose a theory, do the experiment, and tell Y what happened. We invented two tools to deal with this: 1) mathematics, so that we may communicate *precisely* what it is we are talking about using a shared unambiguous language and 2) the requirement for reproducibility.
Mathematics insures that X can communicate to Y exactly what he was thinking in his mind with no loss of information. And reproducibility builds confidence by letting person Y "re-execute" X's mathematical model, retrace the steps of his experiments (or create new experiments) to check X's mathematical model.
That in essense, is science, and without it, we are shit up the creek. We invented the written word, because "oral history" resulted in in "copying errors" of information, where facts and events are distorted as they are transmitted. And we invented mathematics, because descriptions of phenomena written using words are too error prone, since words mean different things to different people. And we invented rational criticism: peer review of the reproducible, because people make mistakes.
Now, if you want to fall back on oral accounts and little fictional stories as explanatory models, fine. But Western society in general has decided to have less overall confidence in such methods. They cannot be distinguished between several alternate stories due to the inherent inability to rule them out *in principle*
As for explanation, one can only interpret what scientific models say, one can't "prove" an explanation. Quantum Mechanics has half a dozen or more "explanations" and none of them can be proven to "more correct" than the other. They all give exactly the same answers and predictions, so it comes down to aesthetics.
