One thing that's missing in a lot of books is: how sure are we about the various statements? How much of it is well tested (Newton, Einstein - though we still had a lot of recent confirmation), how much is still out there (example: BCS theory), how much of it is a "feel good explanation" (hybridization theory) or how much is "the math works out wonderfully if we ignore the skeletons in the closet and the theory sounds a bit crazy" (QFT/QED)
What do you think of economic theories or theories behind psychotherapy? Lot's of real world impact, low confidence in experiments, imo
Not much.
> Lot's of real world impact
Because the theories have influence far out of proportion to their actual track record, yes.
> low confidence in experiments, imo
You can't run controlled experiments in either of those fields, so it's not so much a matter of low confidence in experiments as no ability to do them in the first place. There are some general patterns that can be picked out, but both disciplines deal with non-repeatable human situations that require non-repeatable human judgments to deal with them. Even to call them "sciences" is a stretch, except on a very general usage of the term "science" to basically mean "something people study".
See my response to tonymet upthread.
> Even most scientific theories people believe, they haven't examined and are incapable of following their theories and experiements personally - they were just being told they are truth and they trust it to be so.
For some theories that are called "scientific", yes, this is true--but that's because the scientists themselves don't have a track record of correct experimental predictions to begin with. (String theory, for example.)
But for theories like, say, General Relativity, there is a huge track record of correct experimental predictions, and those predictions include things in our everyday experience now, like GPS. It's true that most people cannot verify for themselves the entire chain of reasoning that leads from the Einstein Field Equation to how their GPS device works, but they know that GPS works from their personal experience, so they know that whatever theory scientists are using to make GPS work, works. They don't have to take that on trust.
In other words, for scientific theories that actually have practical impacts, you don't have to just accept what scientists say on trust; you can look at their track record of correct predictions.