This is exactly why the appeal to authority is such a useful heuristic: when it comes to physics, I trust the man who teaches the engineers that car companies employ to make cars - because I can see cars work every day, so at the end of the chain there must exist a person who has fundamental insights about how the world works.
So while I can't prove something is right by appeal to authority, it's a very practical way for me to swift though the unbounded mass of claims and information that I couldn't possibly verify or prove in my lifetime, not even to a 19th century level of scientific knowledge.
For example, I saw an onion cell once at a school microscope, but I have never seen a bacteria. So as far as I can independently prove, I live in times before the germ theory of disease - but that doesn't mean I shouldn't trust my doctor when he recommends vaccines and antibiotics. The entire antivaxx movement is just an attempt to challenge the medical authority by people who are not intellectually equipped to verify the scientific claims.
So while I can't prove something is right by appeal to authority, it's a very practical way for me to swift though the unbounded mass of claims and information that I couldn't possibly verify or prove in my lifetime, not even to a 19th century level of scientific knowledge.
For example, I saw an onion cell once at a school microscope, but I have never seen a bacteria. So as far as I can independently prove, I live in times before the germ theory of disease - but that doesn't mean I shouldn't trust my doctor when he recommends vaccines and antibiotics. The entire antivaxx movement is just an attempt to challenge the medical authority by people who are not intellectually equipped to verify the scientific claims.