“Which is a primary weakness of forensic-type speculative ‘science’ as opposed to the harder, experimental varieties.”
ALL science is speculative and experimental until there is no challenge to it. But, even at that, so-called “settled science” is anything but.
That some applications work within the constraints and parameters we know, that does not mean those applications are, in fact, the Omega.
“ALL science is speculative and experimental until there is no challenge to it.”
No, that’s not true. There are entire fields of science for which most of their propositions are beyond the ability of experiment to verify. For example, what experiment could verify that geological strata are laid down in the manner and on the timeline that scientists have speculated that they are? Since that timeline is beyond not only a human lifetime, but beyond the postulated length of the existence of the human race itself, it’s simply not possible to imagine any experiment that could verify such speculations which we humans could reasonably perform. Perhaps you could verify some tiny fraction of that process that occurs over years, or a lifetime, or even several lifetimes, but you cannot ever observe or replicate a significant portion of the process. It’s beyond the realm of experimental confirmation due to immutable facts of human reality.
The situation gets even worse when, instead of considering an ongoing process that we can still observe at least a fraction of today, we try to consider an event that occurred completely in the past that we cannot observe at all today. In that case, we are left only with some incomplete portion of the after effects of that event to study, hence why I call such things “forensic” science instead of experimental science, since their situation is much the same as a detective attempting to piece together a picture of an event only by studying the evidence left behind in its wake.