Indeed, while pedlars of shitty apologetics carp from the sidelines, it’s scientists who roll up their sleeves and do the actual work.
The fun part being, of course, that they ALSO do this when overturning an established idea because new data tells them this is required.
It wasn’t a “holy man” that ushered in both quantum mechanics and general relativity to overturn Newton, it was scientists - people such as Einstein, Bohr and Dirac.
Of course, Newton’s ideas are still useful, because [1] they’re an excellent approximation when dealing with low velocities and weak gravity fields, and [2] they’re simpler mathematically, to the point where they can be used effectively by high school students.
You don’t need to unleash the full force of the Ricci calculus and rank 4 tensors to build a house. But you DO need to do this when working out how the spacetime around a black hole behaves.
It’s a testament to Newton that he achieved what he did, in an era when the fastest form of travel was the horse. And that his framework is still good enough to be used by NASA for spaceflight mission planning, including convoluted trajectories involving multiple gravity assist flybys around other planets.
Indeed. I’m reminded at this point, that NASA did this with the Cassini-Huygens mission to Titan. Seven years and three gravity assist slingshots later, they positioned the spacecraft in orbit around Titan, within 100 metres of where they wanted it to be, and within 20 seconds of when they wanted it to be in place.
Goat herder mythologies have nothing comparable to offer.
Science works precisely because scientists are willing to jettison even established ideas, if the data tells them this is warranted. This is a concept mythology fanboys just do not understand, namely, that even an idea that has been in accord with observational data for a long time, can suddenly find itself relegated to the “obsolete” shelf if new data is obtained, that the established idea fails to be in accord with. As happened with Newtonian physics.
Of course, that obsolete idea can remain useful, if it remains an excellent approximation and is simpler to apply, but it’s still obsolete, and for precise work, scientists move on to a better idea.
The point being, that the new idea not only has to be in accord with the new data, but in addition, has to be in accord with ALL the old data as well.
Indeed, this is why finding a working theory of quantum gravity is such a hard task - said theory, if it materialises, has to be in accord with ALL the previous data that upheld quantum mechanics and general relativity, as well as any new data outside the remit of both.
The problem being in this case, that the new data allowing a proper choice of quantum gravity framework has yet to arrive, because the theorists are several steps ahead of the experimenters, and even if that data arrives, building a framework that will be in accord with ALL the data will be a nontrivial task to put it mildly.
But mythology fanboys don’t want to do any of this hard work to further our understanding of the universe and its contents. Instead, they want to keep us shackled to Bronze Age nonsense that has been known to be wrong for centuries. Mythology fanboyism is the elevation of indolence to a virtue that it never was.