GDR writes:
As much as I love reading about things scientific I have a basic problem with treating science as any sort of fundamental truth.
There's a good reason you don't feel comfortable treating science as a fundamental truth. It's because science is not a fundamental truth. Science is a way of finding out things about the universe that have a good chance of being true.
We have no idea as to what our absolute velocity is or to what standard we could measure that velocity against.
Relativity says there's no such thing as absolute velocity.
Science is required to have faith that our perception of things represents reality but there is no empirical proof that this is actually so.
Only if what we see, hear, feel, taste and smell is not empirical evidence of reality could this be true. In other words, of course science studies reality. What we perceive with our senses is the very definition of reality.
You could make Plato style arguments about shadows on a wall, but that's just philosophical masturbation and has nothing to do with the actual practice of science.
--Percy