In science nothing is provable. Things can be falsified but if a hypothesis is true it can actually never be proven. This is because at any point in time and additional observation can be added to your sample that definitively disproves your hypothesis.

All zebras have stripes. is my hypothesis. I observe 100 zebras and I see they have stripes. I see 10 million zebras and I see they have stripes. There is no amount of observations I can make to prove my hypothesis. However if at any point in time I see a zebra with no stripes, I have disproven my hypothesis.

So anything that is in actuality true, is not falsifiable and also un-provable. In short, some statement about our universe can be true, but we can never absolutely know for sure whether that statement is actually true.

Basically your comment isn't logical because you're saying we shouldn't study anything that is true because it's unfalsifiable by definition.

In addition to falsification, Science can make statements that are vague and UN-definitive. Un-definitive claims include causal claims and correlative claims.

Correlation is A and B are casually linked directly or through some other source. A maybe causes B or B maybe causes A or maybe a C is causing A and B.
Causation is A and B are directly linked causally. A causes B.

Science can make the two claims above but such claims are made based off of a sample. If the sample is bad or biased the claim is also bad and biased. Given that we live in an unknown universe of which any sample we extract can only be of finite size out of a potentially infinite size it makes both correlative and causative claims un-definitive. The sample can never fully encompass everything. This is the reason why in science, nothing can be proven.

So in short science can definitively falsify things, and in a vague sense it can make statements about correlations and causation. The later two, though undefinitive can be used to say something about some topic of the universe that is true. But it can't say anything definitive and we can never know for sure.

Because Falsification is limited to things that are false, so much of science doesn't actually use it even though it is a definitive metric.

>As I mentioned however, I am seeking opinions here to the contrary of my gut reaction as my gut is often dumb and reactionary.

The GP is kind of the one that's not too bright. You're definitely a layman but you ask the right questions. GP is not a layman and he's suppose to know certain things and not say what he said. He's very opinionated and makes broad statements without addressing nuance. So don't worry about it! You're not dumb!

GP is utterly wrong. Falsification is still used on the frontiers of modern physics, though much of it nowadays is just correlative results, but if one such correlation is shown not to hold at all, it becomes a falsification. In fact, EVERY single experiment in modern physics is an attempt at falsification. And when the falsification fails... a correlative result is presented as the final answer.

But note, even a falsification is not clear in certain cases. This is because our scientific observation tools have limited accuracy. Most of the time we just assume the observation tools are 100% accurate. But at the frontiers of modern physics the observation tools are so bad that the tools themselves yield probabilistic answers. So while in science falsification is still very much used to clearly discard theories, in modern physics, a negative result is not indicative of a clear cut falsification.