I've heard that Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, used the issue of the chemical composition of the Sun to illustrate his idea of questions that could not be answered. Since it is obvious (in Comte's view) that we can never get a sample from the inside of the sun to test, we can never know what it is made of, and such an inquiry should be written off as "metaphysical," not positive. Silly philosophers, eh? It is very easy in hindsight to say that Comte shouldn't have been so dogmatic about the possible reach of human knowledge, or the specific means by which chemical composition can be determined. What about the inside of a black hole? Can we say anything definitive about THAT? If so ... how? since we can't go there? Or, if anyone of us could get within the "event horizon" for a time, we couldn't get information back. In a recent blog post, a physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder, considers whether the question of the contents of a bl...
