[gjm11]

> black holes

Black holes were treated as mere hypotheses, for many years. Then astronomers started finding things that seemed to behave exactly the way black holes were supposed to behave. Eventually it becomes more reasonable just to say "black hole" instead of "one of those things that behaves exactly like general relativity says black holes should".

I don't think your reflections-in-puddles analogy leads to the conclusions you think it does. It's more like this: We see all these shimmery vague reflections in puddles; we look as carefully as we can at a colossal number of puddles and set the smartest people we can find to work understanding what the puddle-reflections mean. Over hundreds of years, they figure out a lot about these reflections; they find subtle ways to use the reflections to stop people being hit by cars (or, sometimes, to make them get hit by cars; it turns out that this is a thing some governments are willing to spend a lot on). Some of the things we see in these reflections are still mysterious. Reflectionologists say "we should study them more and understand them better". You say "bah, they're fuzzy reflections and probably no one will ever be able to figure anything out from them" -- ignoring the zillions of things that have already been figured out from studying the reflections, many of which have had tremendous practical applications.

[nighthawk648]

I added information about how it is useful. What I was saying is how in the study of the puddle you will never find the real, in the example given, human, experience. One is only to find an extrapolated system of movement none of which describes the motivation for the puddle reflection of Jill to move quick, only the cause of her quick movement. Some correlation may be found but we must remember correlation does not imply causation. No part of the image can show Jills son waiting after soccer practice in the rain because Jill forgot to pick him up which led to her rushing which led to the car accident to begin with.

I did however agree that there are many benefits from the pursuit, I guess I was trying to attest to the limitations of a finite resource driven society.