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.
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.