[whatshisface]

You could argue that those things could just be emprical curve fits, done without any theory behind them. Not that they don't have theory behind them, just that you might be able to arrive at them without any. Thermodynamics in chemistry is a great example where you can find tables full of polynomials curve fit coefficients.

Actually, the fact that the universe yeilds to theory at all is kind of remarkable. Antimatter was "discovered" in the negative-energy solutions of the relativistic version of the Schrodinger equation long before it was found in nature. I can imagine that someone who hadn't seen all of those examples from physics for themselves could imagine that theory, in general, is epistemologically unsound - and demand that everything be directly empirical.

Aside, I think that everyone who is interested in science should spend at least a little time thinking about the philosophy that underlies it - and, you know, it can be very rewarding to reproduce early experiments just so you can see them for yourself.

Next time you're on a trip, try meauring the shadows at different times of day and calculating the radius of the Earth like Eratosthenes. We now have nearly perfect maps and globally synchronized clocks so you should have a much easier time of it than he did.