I think it's rather that we have had a bunch of great curious people who worked on interesting stuff and found out a lot about nature. But we can't equate that with institutional credentialed authoritative "Science".

I guess there is some underlying scientific ethos, that can be learned between the lines, but I don't think it's a clear method (as in the intro textbook definition).

No, we don’t just say that. Recognizing that “knowledge” about the universe is always tentative and contingent and that an understanding of the universe is to be replaced when one with strictly better at predicting observations is identified is the scientific process. And it's a pretty big change from the approaches taken prior to it's adoption.

> In this way science can never be really wrong, because it is always open to being proved wrong

“Science” is almost entirely a combination of openness to being proven wrong and a particular understanding of what it means for something to be proven wrong. Since it is an epistemology, it cannot be “really wrong” if it is consistent, except in terms of a different epistemology.

> I think it's rather that we have had a bunch of great curious people who worked on interesting stuff and found out a lot about nature.

We had a lot of that without the scientific method, too. What the scientific method did is to provide a framework in which the work of great (and not so great) curious people could be effectively aggregated so that they built-in each other, whereas pre-scientific approaches did that notably less well in terms of building an ever-better understanding of the physict universe, because work was judged by standards other than predictive power.

> But we can't equate that with institutional credentialed authoritative "Science".

Science is exactly about authority having little to do with institutional credentials.

Much of the 3 was created using approx 1, before 2 really. 3 is the original source of respect for the masses, the landmark results, the household names, Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein etc. But then come along 2 with their little games and citations and positions and visa requirements and recommendations, CVs, conferences, journals, publish or perish, the push for sexy results for PR announcements and the next grant, p hacking, tyrant supervisors who only care about having a paper at any cost, massaging the data, not speaking up because if funding dries up for the institute, the newly birthed PhD student may lose her job and be deported, the big name prof must be worshipped etc. They co-opt the reputation accrued by the giants, and then if anyone has any criticism, they are scolded for being against the ideal 1, the noble endeavor and ethos and upright honest methodology. In many cases people good at playing game 2 need quite different skillsets than people who'd be good at 1.

But who will produce the next big item for category 3?

Is 2 a good mechanism to encourage practicing 1 to get to 3? I don't think so.

The ethos is simple: all scientific models are judged by their predictive power, and nothing else. If your model does not make accurate predictions, it is wrong, period. Nothing else matters.

I agree that there is no single "method" that guarantees that models will satisfy the above criterion.

Then String Theory is rubbish because it predicts nothing?

Every single theory in science started out with some 'predicate knowledge' and based on 'intuition', scientists reached out a few leaps with some ideas.

Some proved right, many proved wrong.

Some took a while to come together.

"String Theory" is different - it was not based on 'intuition' or any predicate foundation.

'Strings' are a fantasy - just completely made up.

Some people took a fantasy 'new origin' and put tons of math around it.

Since then, they've never been able to map it to reality, or even conceive of an experiment let alone do one.

What it looks like is religion - not only in it's foundation, but in the behaviour of it's acolyltes.

How does a Priest react if you tell him 'God does not exist'?

How does a String Theorist react if you tell him 'There is no String Theory it's just your imagination'.

Perhaps in the greatest of ironies, I actually believe God is more likely to exist than String Theory (!) or at least, there might be some kind of actual spiritual reality to our existence.

Strings? It's just an idea that snowballed into something.

How you come up with ideas and directions is a mystery. It's luck but not just. Kinda like investing.

Feynman also just described that step as "Guess it".

Its not clear at all that our institutional organized science process (grants, papers, academic positions and evaluations) correlate to better success at finding out stuff.

It depends on what the disdain is based on. If the disdain is just based on "your field isn't physics (or chemistry, etc.)", I agree that's not justified. But if the disdain is based on "your models don't make good predictions", I think it's justified. Scientific models are supposed to be judged based on whether or not they make good predictions; if they don't, they're wrong. Models that make good predictions are much, much rarer in the "soft" sciences--many such fields basically have no models with any predictive power at all, yet their proponents claim they are "sciences" and want their models to be used to, for example, make public policy.