A comment on the nature of proof:
When I started out in university, I was studying Biology, but I felt it wasn't really attempting to answer a lot of the sorts of questions I was asking. When I spoke to one of my profs about it, he recommended that if those were the sorts of questions I was asking, I should be studying philosophy, not science.
For me, that turned about to be good advice (although he meant it sarcastically)
Here's something that stuck with me from a course I took on the philosophy of science:
The nature of science is that it cannot prove anything, only disprove.
If you run an experiment on a hypothesis once, you have proved that it worked "that time," but to prove the hypothesis, you would have to run the experiment an infinite amount of times (this is the difference between proof and perceived evidence). But to prove the hypothesis wrong, it only has to be shown to be wrong once (then the hypothesis should be modified based on what you learned through the experiment's result).
So when we talk about "proof" in science, you can add perceived evidence to a theory, but it is impossible to "prove" any theory at all, only disprove it.
Generally, the word "proof" in science is used when it's generally deemed that there have been enough failed attempts to disprove a theory that it seems unlikely it will be disproved. But the burden of proof in philosophy is much higher
I'm just sharing that because I find it personally helpful to keep in mind when discussing science:
You can't prove a theory (but evidence, real or perceived, can make a theory seem likely)
But you can disprove a theory
exactly .. scientific methodology only allows a perceived plausibility ..
.