我们用看不见的东西解释看得见的东西We Explain the Seen in Terms of the Unseen
Brett：说到这里，人们可能会反驳："你怎么敢在科学中引入看不见、观测不到的东西？这显然与科学方法完全相悖。"
而我会说，你所知道的科学中，几乎所有有趣的东西都与那些无法观测的事物有关。
就拿恐龙来说吧。恐龙是无法观测的。你可能会说："等等，我去过博物馆，我见过恐龙。"不，你看到的只是化石，而化石甚至不是骨头。它是已经石化、变质成岩石的骨骼。所以从来没有人真正见过恐龙。
我们见过一些像恐龙的东西，并把它们解读为巨大的、似鸟的爬行动物。当我们把它们的骨架拼装起来时，我们其实是在编造一个故事，讲述数千万乃至数亿年前在地球上行走的这种生物到底是什么。
同样，从来没有人见过太阳的核心，将来也不会有人观测到太阳的核心。但我们知道恒星聚变：氢原子核在那里相互碰撞，形成氦，并在这一过程中产生热量。
我们看不见大爆炸，看不见大陆的漂移。科学中几乎所有有趣的事物，我们都无法直接观测。
Naval：甚至许多我们自称"见过"的东西，其实我们看到的只是仪器探测到了它们。我们通过仪器观察种种效应，然后推断：在那些宇宙里，光子正在与我们能看见的光子相互作用。
Brett: At this point people might object, “How dare you invoke in science things that can’t be seen or observed? This is completely antagonistic towards the scientific method, surely.”
And I would say that almost everything of interest that you know about science is about the unobserved.
Let’s consider dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are unobserved. You say, “Ah, hold on, I’ve been to the museum, I’ve seen a dinosaur.” No, you have seen a fossil, and a fossil isn’t even a bone. It’s an ossified bone that 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 crashed 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.
Naval: Even many of the things that we say we have seen, we’ve actually just seen instruments detect those things. 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.