My theory is that after a few generations we've treated Science as a truth, and not a process. Science should be displacing existing science. There are likely some things that we have understood wrong, but nobody is out there trying to actively disprove what we know of physics. Nobody can get funded trying alternative hypotheses that explain the same phenomena.
This might also be because there are no new phenomena to explain. There's a lot of resistance to observing new and old phenomena because that can "disprove science", as if there's some war between science and some kind of alternative. For example, ghosts have been observed by millions, but instead of finding some solid hypotheses for these, we dismiss them as some kind of mental illness in observers. Ghost hunters use electrical signals or some similar sensors, and we dismiss them too, instead of trying to find out what is causing these signals.
A lot of scientific work still happens in fields like psychology/cognitive science, or medicine, which people intuitively feel are off. But little in physics.
> but nobody is out there trying to actively disprove what we know of physics.
You get a Nobel when you disprove what we know of physics, so it is an interesting research topic. Currently the main problem in particle physics is that everything is working too well, so nobody know where too look to find a new theoretical result.
A few years ago many people was thinking that the neutrino was a Majorana particle (in particular, in implies that the neutrino and the antineutrino are the same particle). I didn't like that idea too much [1], and luckily the experiments failed and that theory is slowly fading [2].
More recently, some other people expected that the next step was supersymmetry (the electron is a fermion, and the supersymmetry says that has a heavy version that is a boson). I liked it [1], but I think the experiments are also not favorable [2].
> There's a lot of resistance to observing new and old phenomena because that can "disprove science"
No. The LHC is working, and making observations and redoing the old calculations. Sometimes because there are new combinations of particles that nobody had seen before, sometimes because they must give some calculations to the graduate students so they can publish something.
> My theory is that after a few generations we've treated Science as a truth, and not a process.
In other comments in internet discussions I sometime get this feeling too. But don't confuse that with the attitude of the people doing research.
[1] I'm not an expert in this area, I only took a few courses in particle physics. It's more like a coffee time discussion level opinion.
[2] But you never know if experiments at higher energy will revert the trend and have results that agree with the theory.
This might also be because there are no new phenomena to explain. There's a lot of resistance to observing new and old phenomena because that can "disprove science", as if there's some war between science and some kind of alternative. For example, ghosts have been observed by millions, but instead of finding some solid hypotheses for these, we dismiss them as some kind of mental illness in observers. Ghost hunters use electrical signals or some similar sensors, and we dismiss them too, instead of trying to find out what is causing these signals.
A lot of scientific work still happens in fields like psychology/cognitive science, or medicine, which people intuitively feel are off. But little in physics.