Catalog: Proven Systems

Direct, repeated, quantitative experimental confirmation — the working core of modern physics. “Proven” here means independently tested by multiple methods and groups, not just internally consistent or widely believed.

• General Relativity — confirmed via Mercury’s perihelion, 1919 light bending, gravitational time dilation down to millimeter scale, LIGO’s gravitational waves, and direct black-hole imaging.
• Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) — the electron g-factor matches theory and measurement to ~10 significant figures, arguably the most precisely verified prediction in science.
• Special Relativity — time dilation and length contraction confirmed via particle-accelerator lifetimes, GPS corrections, and countless collider experiments since 1905. (Dedicated page not yet written — see General Relativity, which subsumes it in the weak-field limit.)
• The Semi-Empirical Mass Formula — a century-old, still-standard fit to real measured nuclear binding energies across the periodic table.
• Bell’s Theorem & Quantum Entanglement — loophole-free tests (2015) confirm nature violates local realism; 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.
• Standard cosmological expansion (Hubble expansion, CMB, Big Bang nucleosynthesis) — the expansion/thermal-history framework itself is proven, distinct from dark matter/dark energy’s literal nature — see Standard Cosmology for the split.
• Blackbody Radiation & Planck’s Quantization — the 1900 discovery that started quantum mechanics; confirmed from lab sources to the Cosmic Microwave Background’s own near-perfect blackbody spectrum.

Proven doesn’t mean “final” or “complete” — GR and QED are both proven and both known to be incomplete (they don’t unify with each other, for instance). See Unknowns for what proven physics itself still can’t explain.