Faced with a set of data that includes a puzzling and unexplained phenomenon, scientists construct hypotheses of the mechanism that might be involved, and then conduct experiments to test those hypotheses. Many experiments on the cutting edge of science fail, and most hypotheses turn out to be wrong. Science is progressive and self-correcting: no significantly erroneous conclusions or false hypotheses can be sustained for long, as newer observations will ultimately knock down incorrect constructs. But over a long period of time, a consistent set of observations sometimes emerges that leads to
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