[visarga]

> even the most experienced and informed professionals can be comfortably wrong

That's the human hallucination problem. In science it's a very difficult issue to deal with, only in hindsight you can tell which papers from a given period were the good ones. It takes a whole scientific community to come up with the truth, and sometimes we fail.

[auggierose]

No. It takes just one person to come up with the truth. It then can takes ages to convince the "scientific community".

[visarga]

Well, one person will usually add a tiny bit of detail to the "truth". It's still a collective task.

[auggierose]

I don't think so. The truth is advanced by individuals, not by the collective. The collective is usually wrong about things as long as they possibly can be. Usually the collective first has too die before it accepts the truth.