I have in mind four interesting cases of the relationship between empiricism and science that my readers should know about. 
None of these prove any point that I can see.
1. The prevailing theories explaining superconductivity were demolished by an IBM research lab in Germany in the mid-1980s when superconducting materials were demonstrated at much higher than predicted temperatures.
2.
The Nobel winning physicist, Donald Glaser, created a machine at U.C.
Berkeley in the 1980s that could grow a hundred thousand bacteria at a
time and showed that by correlating bacterial growth patterns with
controls for specific human diseases, the machine could be used to
identify those diseases in humans from a urine test. The NIH defunded
the program because, though the empirical evidence was overwhelming,
there was no theory to explain how the bacteria could be doing what
they were doing.
3. I was brought to a lab in Tokyo of an
Hitachi division by a scientist I met in the late 1980s. The lab had
developed an x-ray microscope that was yielding images that didn't make
sense to anyone. These were very short wave x-rays, longer wave x-rays
were already in use in x-ray crystallography. The problem was that no matter what materials were put in the machines, the image patterns that the machine was generating didn't conform to any theory of what the material structure looked like.
4. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, first detected the cosmic background radiation in 1965, when trying unsuccessfully to create an absolutely silent radio listening antenna. They tried everything in their electronic handbag but in the end concluded the problem was not in the radio antenna, it must be something real the antenna was picking up.