Certain disciplines – like cosmology and quantum physics – are empirically-challenged. They exist within a cloud of uncertainty by their very nature. For instance, parallax only works to 1% the diameter of the Milky Way, and there is much we cannot actually see in the quantum domain. We should make sure to never close our minds to alternative ideas for this very reason.
Scientists are forced to look to the theory to make the actual observations in the more speculative disciplines. At a certain point, it becomes a stack of interlinking conjectures. This is rarely explained in the press releases. The task that a critical thinker faces is to understand the reasoning behind each proposition in those press releases. What I’m trying to say is if all of the assumptions and interdependencies were explicitly explained in the press releases, the claims being made would look more like a delicate house of cards.
(Engineers get paid to make things work; scientists have the much harder job of explaining why. Technologies do not necessarily prove inferences. The sort of thing that will stop a scientist in his tracks might lead an engineer to simply experiment through trial and error until it works. Just because the math can be made to work does not mean that scientists understand the physical mechanism at play.)
