The scientific process is a loop.
It is the most successful idea our species has ever had. Not a body of facts, not a profession, not a building full of instruments: a procedure. And the procedure is not a ladder that climbs toward certainty. It goes around.
Below is an honest drawing of it. Note which stretch of road is worn smoothest.
Fig. 1. The loop, drawn honestly. Line weights are proportional to traffic.
Run a true story through it.
Everything in this run actually happened, within living memory. No names: the loop does not care whose hands are on it.
Why the worn patch is the point.
Most ways of deciding what is true treat being wrong as a humiliation: something to be explained away, lawyered, or quietly buried. This is the only one that surveyed it, paved it, and printed it on the map as a scheduled stop. The loop does not work despite the wrong turns. It works because of them. Every pass through the worn patch is the world getting a vote.
Note also what the drawing does not have: an exit marked certain. Claims never graduate from the loop. They just survive more laps of it, and the longer they survive, the harder we are allowed to lean on them. Continents drift. Stomachs host bacteria. Both spent decades as heresy, went through the worn patch, and came out the other side as furniture.
It is the most successful idea we have ever had. It is also the only one that would be pleased to be proven wrong about that.