The point is that in empirical science, we take our observations of the universe as the starting point. And not any ideas or theories of how we think the univer

The point is that in empirical science, we take our observations of the universe as the starting point. And not any ideas or theories of how we think the universe should function. There was a time before empirical science took off, that the latter was still the modus operandi, a lot of beautiful theories were made but in the end science got hopelessly stuck. It's funny that we're a bit in a similar situation now. Again we have a bunch of theories, e.g. in cosmology and quantum theory, that are based on not much more than an idea of how things should be. The Great Unification Theory springs to mind for instance. And again we seem to be stuck.