Many scientists won’t deviate from promoting established accepted theory because their incomes and reputations will be ruined by the people who have the power of official approval, often the same people who pay them and fund their work. They will stick to the script even when emerging evidence from better observation brings accepted theory into question. This is in every branch of scientific inquiry—astronomy, archaeology, paleontology, geology, biology, human history, medicine, you name it. Each one has its accepted theories no one is allowed to question. The theories upon which they settle harden to become “the truth” everyone must believe, but then it ceases to be science. In every way it becomes like a religion, not the kind that brings people joy, but the kind that burns heretics. Inconvenient evidence is either buried or ignored, or if it is too big and obviously true to be ignored, it is cobbled into the prevailing theory, sometimes with ridiculous stretches of logic to make it work. (Look up Greek planetary epicycles.)

But truth is not truth just because some important people say so. Scientifically, a thing is only truth if it can be proven, and if you aren’t allowed to ask questions about something that is unproven but held to be true, it’s not science. It’s information control. Peer review is the primary internal tool the people governing science use to do that. Peer review used to be an honest effort to weed out bad science or incomplete experimentation, but now it’s a big part of how the “guardians of truth” preserve accepted wisdom against being questioned. This has been going since the dawn of civilization. In the 1600s Galileo was “peer reviewed” by the Catholic Church for daring to say the earth orbited the sun, and he was forced to recant under threat of being burned at the stake. The same thing is going on today, but it is a scientist’s reputation and income that are thrown into the fire when they won't back off.

That is the secondary way science is constrained, but for most, internal constraints are sufficient to keep them under control, even if those conditions are imposed. It all starts in school. People get locked into what they were taught, and they go out into the world never questioning what they think they know. They never see any reason to suspect that some of the information they learned might not be correct because, after all, respected elders told them the “settled” wisdom all smart people know to be true. Everything else they learned was built on that foundation, and they are exposed to little outside that limit of inquiry. This happens just as much to scientists and doctors as it does to anyone else. It is the other reason, the primary reason, they get so locked into prevailing theory and can’t see beyond that box.

Add to this the fact that education in the sciences has been highly specialized for years. Students learn very little from other disciplines that might impact or inform the area of their specialty. For instance, astronomy students are never taught about electricity enough to understand it. They never learn the things a humble engineer has to learn about electromagnetism, which have been known to a high degree of accuracy for over a century. Consequently, you hear of astronomers coming up with all sorts of absurd theories about magnetic fields they see on the sun or find in space everywhere they look. They think they are smart to propose things like magnetic reconnection or magnetic fields existing on their own apart from a running current. These are things any first year engineering student knows to be physically impossible, and it is no different from saying fairies light the stars with their farts. The relationship between magnetism and electric current is settled science in terms of how it works because no one has ever observed it being different, yet the ridiculous theories of astronomers are published because they fit in the box of the big mama theory of astronomy that must be preserved on pain of death, the big bang (which is not settled science because it is increasingly facing serious challenges from things that shouldn’t be there if the theory is true).

The good news is that these boxes never last. There is an inevitable cycle that results in established theory being replaced or modified by a better one, and at this very moment we are on the cusp of another revolution in the sciences. It is becoming too difficult to patch the holes being blasted in the central theories of several branches of science. New discoveries keep coming, and eventually the ones desperately trying to salvage their failing constructs will give in rather than look like idiots. This is but another aspect of the Great Awakening. It touches everything, and it is touching science. Actually, it is grabbing science by the balls. You just never hear enough about it to pay attention, but they are using words like “crisis” and “catastrophe” as if the world were coming to an end. We will soon learn how much has been built upon lies to cover the fact that scientific understanding was less complete that they were willing to admit.