He is wrong that the fundamental aspect of science is experiment. The actual fundamental process is observation. Experiments are simply observation in a controlled setting.
In fact, astronomy has a very long history of hypothesis and testing of said hypotheses going back to at least Prolemy, if not to Eudoxus.
Ptolemy formulated a hypothesis about why the planets appear to move as they do in the sky. It was a hypothesis that worked reasonably well for hundreds of years. But over time, the discrepancy betwen the predictions of Ptolemy's model and the real observations became such that a new theory was required. This lead to Copernicus and his model, which was supported by the observations of Galileo, thereby testing and showing the Ptolemaic model was wrong. Kepler gave detailed descriptions of how the planets move in the sky based on hypotheses now called Kepler's three laws of motion. In discovering these laws, he hypothesized and rejected many other possibilities over a period spanning a decade of calculations based on the observations of Tycho Brahe.
Then, Newton came along and proposed his hypothesis of universal gravitation, which both explained Kepler's conclusions and showed how to improve them by taking into account the gravity of the other planets.
Because of this, the flat earth ideas have not only bested, but they were tested and showed to be wrong many times over. Astronomy was, in many ways, the *first* real science because it based its ideas on attempting to explain observations and usinr observations to test the hypotheses made. That *is* the scientific method.
Now, we can add a great deal to this, from the use of parallax (and trigonometry) observations to measure the distances to nearby stars (first done in 1830), to using spectroscopy to learn the compositions of astronomical bodies. This process was good enough that helium was first detected in spectrographs of the sun (hence the name helium, after helios) and only later found on Earth. We can even compare the spectra of ionized atoms on Earth to those in space to learn about the higher energy conditions in space.
And don't forget that all of physics, from theories of light, to chemistry, to nuclear physics, etc have been tested in the labratory of the larger universe. And not all that lobng ago, we finally detected gravitational waves.
To say astronomy is not a science is a shocking admission of ignorance of the role astronomy has played in the *formation* and continuation of the scientific method. It isn't just wrong, it is stupidly wrong.
In fact, astronomy has a very long history of hypothesis and testing of said hypotheses going back to at least Prolemy, if not to Eudoxus.
Ptolemy formulated a hypothesis about why the planets appear to move as they do in the sky. It was a hypothesis that worked reasonably well for hundreds of years. But over time, the discrepancy betwen the predictions of Ptolemy's model and the real observations became such that a new theory was required. This lead to Copernicus and his model, which was supported by the observations of Galileo, thereby testing and showing the Ptolemaic model was wrong. Kepler gave detailed descriptions of how the planets move in the sky based on hypotheses now called Kepler's three laws of motion. In discovering these laws, he hypothesized and rejected many other possibilities over a period spanning a decade of calculations based on the observations of Tycho Brahe.
Then, Newton came along and proposed his hypothesis of universal gravitation, which both explained Kepler's conclusions and showed how to improve them by taking into account the gravity of the other planets.
Because of this, the flat earth ideas have not only bested, but they were tested and showed to be wrong many times over. Astronomy was, in many ways, the *first* real science because it based its ideas on attempting to explain observations and usinr observations to test the hypotheses made. That *is* the scientific method.
Now, we can add a great deal to this, from the use of parallax (and trigonometry) observations to measure the distances to nearby stars (first done in 1830), to using spectroscopy to learn the compositions of astronomical bodies. This process was good enough that helium was first detected in spectrographs of the sun (hence the name helium, after helios) and only later found on Earth. We can even compare the spectra of ionized atoms on Earth to those in space to learn about the higher energy conditions in space.
And don't forget that all of physics, from theories of light, to chemistry, to nuclear physics, etc have been tested in the labratory of the larger universe. And not all that lobng ago, we finally detected gravitational waves.
To say astronomy is not a science is a shocking admission of ignorance of the role astronomy has played in the *formation* and continuation of the scientific method. It isn't just wrong, it is stupidly wrong.
