Yes fair point Pete. No one would accept quantum mechanics Although really with something like this that is clearly testable and repeatable that had such clear results, it is a sign of the naturally conservative nature of many/most individual specialists that they where recieved in a way that disregarded their results for so long. With many other areas of science its not about clear results and so this can be to some extent less clear. I'm not at all saying the kind of things the alternative historians/new age bunch come out with. The process is essentially pretty robust at investigating the natural world - and if studies are done well they should bring up possibilities/exceptions/anomalies that require new studies that have a different approach and refine the understanding.

But I think because science is so large and so highly specialised it does make it more difficult to make 'quantum' leaps. Take H. Pylori. Like so many agents of disease they are present in nearly all people nearly all the time. There is a good chance they are even beneficial. What we hardly understand at all is why things go wrong with a certain person at a certain time. There are all kinds of general assumptions but none that really make sense. And so science finds this question difficult - its much easier to do scientific work that look at a known pathogen and work out how to get rid of it. Much like the whole question of the placebo effect which has been shown to be physically active, or in physics where most researchers would prefer to just accept entanglement's action at a distance and move on without wasting too much time on things which don't fit the existing framework.

I don't really see any of that as a problem as such. Its a kind of necessary-chip-away-at-the-rockface approach that does move things on eventually. The big problem IMO is all the people - partly due to the media and partly due to the sheer achievements of science - who think that its almost a fait au complet. That all scientists are doing now is a few extra very fine chips at the wall to reveal a smooth and shiny surface that is a final truth. I'm definitely not saying scientists themselves hold that view, but the huge degree of specialisation, each dealing with massive quantities of information that are involved nowdays, can help generate a kind of assumption that can resemble it in some ways.

Simon