system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 Why you can't prove a negative.

I am just having a hard time grasping the concept and need it explained to me. 

I accept that it is true, and it *feels* right. But I can't explain to myself why you can't prove something isn't/doesn't.
gpt
You can indeed prove a negative, and logically it is no different from proving a positive.  The problem that arises is that in many cases it is impractical or impossible (physically) to prove some specific negatives.  For example, you can prove that there are no cats in your box by opening the box and looking inside, but you can't prove that there are no cats in boxes anywhere.  This is not because there is something that logically prevents you, it's just that the universe is a very big place that contains lots of boxes, some or many of which could be in another galaxy in the possession of an alien species.  Unless you can look at them all, you can't "prove" the negative.  It's not a question of logic, its a question of logistics. 

In the purely logical world, you can use techniques like induction to prove something about a large or infinite number of things without having to prove (or disprove) each individually by proving one case and then showing that it applies equally to all cases.

This question often comes up in reference to god, and the important thing to take away from it is that the concept of god is ill defined, and using very vague definitions often leads to situations where it is impossible to disprove god because there are an infinite number of ways he/she/it could manifest and no limits on what he/she/it could do, what form they could take, or what ways we could detect them.  Given a more restrictive definition of god might allow one to construct a proof of nonexistance.