It's not so uncommon in science to come to a strange conclusion by excluding all "reasonable" alternatives. For example, black holes have a similar status: no one has conclusively seen one, but we know of no mechanism for matter to support itself beyond a certain density, so black hole it is.
Have we not pointed telescopes into space and seen the way light bends around a black hole? I guess in a way it's true that nobody has conclusively "seen" one (since they don't emit light), but by that logic nobody has conclusively seen the hole in the middle of a donut either.
> but by that logic nobody has conclusively seen the hole in the middle of a donut either.
Not quite..we can see the donut hole very clearly, put things through it, measure it, interact with it. We can measure and observe and test it however we like.
My understanding is that the EHT images are a result of a lot (like, months) of data processing, not an image from the telescope. So arguably still not a direct observation.
Digital photographs are just the result of processing the sensor readings of photodiodes. It seems quite arbitrary to say one is an "image" and the other isn't just because the processing step is more complicated. Both accurately represent what you would see if you were there in person (ignoring false color etc.).
> It's not so uncommon in science to come to a strange conclusion by excluding all "reasonable" alternatives.
That is not what happen in the article, or to my understanding in this field of research.
> For example, black holes have a similar status: no one has conclusively seen one, but we know of no mechanism for matter to support itself beyond a certain density, so black hole it is.
Comparing the equation based methods of physics, often called a "hard" science, to neurology or biology, often called a a "soft" science, is not going to be an apples to apples comparison.
There is a continuum of hardness within the quantitative sciences, and physics definitely lies on the "more testable and verifiable" than chemistry, biology, and neuroscience (not neurology- that's a form of medicine). Many of the biological systems we work with, we don't even really test and verify, especially not at the level that a large-scale particle physics experiment would.
If you want to insist that biology is as testable and verifiable as physics, I have no interest in arguing with you- it's just a difference of opinion (and I think people with experience across the continuum would agree with me).
> If you want to insist that biology is as testable and verifiable as physics, I have no interest in arguing with you- it's just a difference of opinion
I just think the whole "There is a continuum of hardness within the quantitative sciences" is irrelevant. It's more of a binary thing, and biology is a hard science, period. But sure, we can agree to disagree.
Without any doubt though, biology is not a 'soft' science.
You seem to agree that the testability is not binary:
> Soft sciences are those that don't lend themselves to testing and verification very well, like economics and psychology.
But want hard to only used in a binary fashion with some heuristic triggering the step function from soft to hard.
People do talk using the term that way. They also use it as a continuum saying one field is harder than an another. I quoted the terms, "hard" and "soft" in my message above because the terms are used in a few different ways and are not rigorously defined. They only need a rough definition to make the point I was making though.
This sounds like the whole "we've never seen a species evolving". Much like fossils, radioactive dating, geology come together to give us a picture of evolution, we have tons of real evidence for black holes. But we even have two actual pictures now.
