Every time there's some result in physics that doesn't match with the standard model, say, there's a flood of breathless "scientists are wrong!" headlines that make it sound like they're all incompetent bumblers who get embarrassingly shown up as elitist chancers by the "university of life".

In reality, the physicists themselves know the models are incomplete, have painstakingly devised an cutting-edge experiment to probe that uncertainty and are ecstatic that there is more to study and that they have a new clue to follow. Imagine how sad it would be to be a physicist on the day that the Grand Unified Theory is discovered and physics is complete.

Related to this, and tangentially connected to the topic of reading fiction, I'll take this as an opportunity to raise one of the many things that I disliked about Cixin Liu's “The Three-Body Problem”. I honestly don't understand why it is held in such high regard, let alone sometimes described as "hard" science fiction. Spoilers evidently follow.

One of the initial plot points in the novel is that many top scientists in fields close to theoretical physics are misteriously committing suicide. Eventually it is revealed that they're doing it because an alien civilisation is surreptitiously using advanced technology to secretly interfere with human research at the subatomic level or something of the sort, to the point that the affected scientists are coming across such contradictory, counterfactual and inconsistent results that they finally commit suicide out of despair, shame, or loss of faith in science.

The idea that scientists, when faced with sudden nonsensical results which they cannot explain, would feel compelled not only to keep this fact to themselves but also to take their own lives is an unbelievably ignorant take on the workings of science as a field and a community.

If an evil power were to somehow alter reality to start breaking the expected rules of the Universe scientists would be absolutely excited about it, not suicidal! And even if they were to eventually despair out of the meticulously planned inconsistency caused by the evil manipulators, such that nothing could ever be predicted again, the despair would happen long after years and years of scientific conventions making the whole situation very public!

I have to imagine, too, if they were to give up individually, they’d still want to stick around in hopes someone else discovers the root cause.

You're misremembering - the reason they committed suicide is because the Trisolreans made the scientists hallucinate using the sophons. Notably the countdown was a big plot point.

That being said the entire thing was kind of dumb.

I don't ever remember seeing a 'science is wrong' headline before COVID, only breathless headlines about the benefits of whatever the article is about. For reference see the latest breathless headlines about the solar panels that can produce energy at night, despite it being 50 milliwats even in the original papers title.

They certainly made a meal out of the "superluminal" OPERA neutrinos, and that was 10 years ago. Anything that can be phrased as "Einstein wrong?!" is particularly gleefully seized upon, despite Betteridge's cautions.

What if the author thinks that "according to science..." means "a statistically significant number of studies on this subject have come to the same conclusion that..."? Like when the media reported that the LHC had confirmed the existence of the higgs boson? It wasn't one study, it was a bunch of studies and experiments over many years that eventually crossed a confidence threshold.

I agree this can be an issue, however in this case it’s actually a meta-analysis of several studies so the wording is a bit more justified here.

"Backed by science", "according to science" etc is the new marketing buzz-phrase and it's very annoying. I think it's a reaction to the world of conjecture, "alternate facts", and opinion that dominates us thanks to... well basically thanks to 6 years of Trump, I guess.

However whenever I read now "according to science", or something similar I just baulk.