Take Covid. People with reasonable questions about the efficacy of masks and the clot shot were dismissed as heretics. I thought that was the entire POINT of science. Asking questions and being a heretic and discovering something nobody else has.
It never was.
And it sure isn't now.
The history of science is littered with "no wait....that's wrong...THIS is right..." going through the rinse and repeat cycle endlessly.
And that's ok. Inquiry and challenge and "being a science heretic" is, in many ways, how mankind learns more and can fix more problems.
One of my favorite sagas regarding "accuracy" and "settled science" is ulcers.
In 1981 Barry Marshall began working with Robin Warren, the Royal Perth Hospital pathologist who, two years earlier, discovered the gut could be overrun by hardy, corkscrew-shaped bacteria called Helicobacter pylori. Biopsying ulcer patients and culturing the organisms in the lab, Marshall traced not just ulcers but also stomach cancer to this gut infection. The cure, he realized, was readily available: antibiotics. But mainstream gastroenterologists were dismissive, holding on to the old idea that ulcers were caused by stress.
Unable to make his case in studies with lab mice (because H. pylori affects only primates) and prohibited from experimenting on people, Marshall... ran an experiment on ...himself. He took some H. pylori from the gut of an ailing patient, stirred it into a broth, and drank it....Back in the lab, he biopsied his own gut, culturing H. pylori and proving unequivocally that bacteria were the underlying cause of ulcers.
For their work on H. pylori, Marshall and Warren shared a 2005 Nobel Prize. Today the standard of care for an ulcer is treatment with an antibiotic.
But science isn't math. Your checking account balance is the sum of deposits less sum of withdrawals. Always. Forever.
The problem arises when people try to equate science with math...usually they call it "settled science." And, to be sure, robust inquiry and disciplined application of the scientific method usually gives you clear and distinct results. Then, science is settled...until we get new data or better techniques, and then we get "wait a minute..".
For example, there was a most excellent article posted on how "settled science" wasn't so settled, wherein:
seems that Earth has been misplaced. According to a new map of the Milky Way galaxy, the Solar System's position isn't where we thought it was. Not only is it closer to the galactic centre - and the supermassive hole therein, Sagittarius A* - it's orbiting at a faster clip.
It further noted other "errors" in SCIENCE:
A good recent example of this is the red giant star Betelgeuse, which turned out to be closer to Earth than previous measurements suggested. This means that it's neither as large nor as bright as we thought. Another is the object CK Vulpeculae, a star that exploded 350 years ago. It's actually much farther away, which means that the explosion was brighter and more energetic, and requires a new explanation, since previous analyses were performed under the assumption it was relatively low energy
The other problem arises when Certain Powers work overtime to suppress assiduous inquiry. Which, is what we have today as well. It's a bad double whammy.
In the interest of full disclosure, my "science isn't math" quote came from a recent post on social sciences, that featured this brilliant give and take involving a Harvard faculty member critical of Charles Murray from the original article, that is worth reprinting - it is with regard to the "certainty of SCIENCE":
"so why should we let someone teach social science that we know to be wrong in our social science courses?"
Because it is possible that you are wrong.
Science is not mathematics. Newtonian physics was wrong. And social science is a further three rungs down in certainty from science.
Your level of certainty and arrogance about what can be said, and probably thought, smacks of religion, and not science. This is a political religion that permeates academia at the moment. And which I am fairly sure you will swear does not infect you, while the rest of us can see the symptoms quite plainly.
Only religions ban heretics from speaking because of the wrong-think they might cause. Real science loves a good heretic. In fact, honestly, the entire goal of science is to be a heretic. To have an idea that no other person ever had. Science is the pretty much the antithesis of your thought-police approach.
And most of academia used to be the antithesis of your thought police approach as well, until the religion of leftism took it over, with the direct help of people like you.