This is something that has been bothering me for a while as I’m diving through space articles, documentaries etc. All seem to take our observations for granted, which are based on the data of the entire observable universe (light, waves, radiation…) we receive at our, in comparison, tiny speck. How do we know we are interpreting all this correctly with just the research we’ve done in our own solar system and we’re not completely wrong about everything outside of it?
This never seems to be addressed so maybe I’m having a fundamental flaw in my thought process.
Whats different in our understanding within the solar system compared to outside? It’s telescopes looking at light from far away.
In ours we can send probes to confirm our observations, but the closest other star is so far away we’ll never even get 1% closer in our lifetime.
I’ve already gotten good answers to why this shouldn’t matter though.
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There’s lots to learn about and lots of perspective shifts that (counterintuitively) can be found when you start to learn about particle physics.
I started to get into it about 2 years ago, and at first I was totally baffled. I kind of saw that as a fun thing though because it gave me cause to keep exploring backwards until I understood some fundamentals better.
Every time I started to think I grasped something, it just made more questions bubble up.
In the end, for as much as I think I understand about particle physics, I really don’t, but I sure as hell know about all kinds of scientific measurement processes, theories, and underlying concepts of how the universe works (which is fundamentally different than what we assume and what we have been taught).