themselves to public scrutiny, thus insuring that the experiments are reproducible
and unprejudiced.
On some rare occasions an experiment will verify a prediction that is not
verified by other contemporary experiments. Yet, in the long run, this single
result turns out to be correct. This is the case where the experimental techniques
of the first researcher are much superior to any contemporaries’. Even though
the positive claims are verified by future careful and more sophisticated experiments
it is undeniable that the original positive results are criticized and even
ridiculed by contemporaries. The pain associated with the creation or confirmation
of scientific theories is almost always relegated to footnotes, if mentioned
at all.7
The predictions made by the theory should apply to all phenomena that the
theory claims to describe. If the majority of such predictions, but not all, are
confirmed, the hypothesis should be modified in order to properly describe the
discrepancies, or to explain why they do not fall within its scope. Theories
cannot pick and choose the phenomena they aim to describe by selecting
successes and rejecting failures.