My father and I had an intriguing discussion this evening which began at the discussion of black holes, Hawking, astrophysics, etc. We'd talked about this several months ago, when he expressed his skepticism of cutting-edge, "theoretical physics" by saying "they end up manipulating the observations to fit the mathematical model we have." It's backwards from the classical scientific approach of observation-first.

A few weeks before that I'd written the following: