While Popper may have said some interesting things about science, I do not consider him the final answer on everything. While I like Popper's political views, I do not like or agree with his overall skepticism. To say that we really cannot know anything is silly. If we do not 'know' anything we would not be able to function. To me it is a denial of life. Even Hume, who really wanted to deny that anything was provable, did not dare go so far as to deny that science could not prove anything.
Further, I am not talking about theories, I am talking about facts. Scientists do not sit around thinking up stuff. They spend their time proving or disproving things by experimentation, observation, and any other way which can help them determine the truth of a situation. They often spend a large part of their lives trying to prove how something works. The Law of Gravity has not been disproven, the atom bomb proves E=Mc2, and there are thousands proofs out there to scientific statements. Are the theories behind bridge building fairy tales? If you think so then perhaps you should not ever cross a bridge. After all who wants to risk their life on a fairy tale?
Do you remember the post I made to you about the difference between Newton's Law of Gravity and Gravitational Theory?
Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation has a few problems. These were accounted for by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
Just one of the problems with Newton's law is that it assumed that the gravitational attraction was an instantaneous force.
Yes, it would be, but of course this is not what Popper says. Popper might say it's silly to pretend that our knowledge of nature, even our best knowledge, is certain when it isn't, or that the value of that knowledge is dependent on it being so.
I don't wish to waste time with a purely sematic debate. I mean by a "scientific fact" a "well confirmed observation". BTW I don't consider evolution to be a "scientific fact," but then neither is heliocentrism. Both are too complex and too general. The facts are that the planet Mars is observed at such and so a polar coordinate at one time, and at different specific polar coordinates at other times. Heliocentrism (and other relevant theories) explains those facts. That's what theories do -- explain facts.
Scientists do not sit around thinking up stuff. They spend their time proving or disproving things by experimentation, observation, and any other way which can help them determine the truth of a situation.
Actually scientists DO "think stuff up". There would be no point in doing the experiments or making the observations otherwise. Those are tests. There has to be some kind of theory, hypothesis, or a generalization of some kind, or there is nothing to test, and no way to determine the signifcance of the result of an experiment or observation. Facts simply are, as they are, as they are. They bear no scientific significance, apart from their sheer reality of being, in and of themselves, but only as they are shown to be consistent, inconsistent or artifactual wrt to some theory about them.