RE: The End Of Reason: A Glimpse Behind The Curve
Modern science has become so specialized and it requires so much time invested into it that ordinary people do not do it (and it would not be practical for the average Joe which is a unfortunate). Science and Engineering students on the other hand have to do it at least during their formation years (although not all institutions are at the same level).
The answer is yes, it is done, all the time, every year, around the world. In a more practical way every time that a plane takes off and lands is a testament that what we know about thermodinamics, friction, fluid dinamics, electricity, etc is accurate to an acceptable degree; every time that a transistor in your smart phone works proves that quantum tunneling is an accurate description of what happens at the subatomic level (to name a couple of examples). But the body of knowledge is so vast that no human being can test every theory out there and we have to defer to specialist even within the same fields.
A healthy dose of sckepticism about what we know is always good. Otherwise we would stagnate.
But there is a difference between what we know about our world and what we guess concerning things that happened long ago. For example, the Grand Canyon and Mount St. Helens.
We can only draw conclusions based on the evidence and the body of knowledge that we have. The time scales are not important as everything that we see ocurrs in the past, and I mean everything since the speed of light has a limit, even the events that happen in front of our eyes took place a few nano seconds before we perceive them.
That is why science is the best tool to acquire knowledge, it gives us a way of constantly improving our understanding as long as we remind ourselves that new discoveries might change how we view the world and we don't cling to outdated ideas.
There are strong differences between observing things in the recent past, and ongoing, in a continual process, the scientific process, and simply looking at something from long ago that you were not there to see in the process. The two are two different types of sciences. They're not the same in a variety of ways. That should be the emphasis. Of course, everything is in the past. But that is not the difference between the two sciences. The difference is that one is past-tense while the other is past-tense continuous. The second one is ongoing in the moment as the experiments and observations are taken place in real-time.