My wife is a biology teacher, and she has the following quote hanging in her room: “Science is the orderly accumulation of discarded hypotheses.” I forget the author. Regardless, the point is that we gradually learn what is true by learning what is false. Every idea in science—no matter how foundational—is subject to reexamination. The scientific method is the means by which we determine if something is false. Scientific consensus is the the scientific community’s best current explanation of phenomena based on our knowledge of what the explanation can’t be.
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