Science as an Emperical Activity

Science is an emperical activity. One does an experiment and sees how things work. Prehistory can not de facto be emperical. We can hypothesize but we need to be very careful about stating things as factual when we simply can not know. That is the point of my post, not the actual numbers cited to the student. The point was they were installed as accepted facts which they are not. One can say, "We believe such and such..." but not "Such and such happened" when such things cannot be verified emperically, even if a pope is "on your side".