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Re: "Opinions? Science does not have opinions."

>> Science is black or white and tolerates no disagreement

> Science that is like this is VERY rare.

Quite the opposite. 100% of science is like this by definition because of the scientific method.

> Engineering toleraties no disagrements...

Engineering is a separate discipline to science. Making decisions about conflicting requirements is what engineers do and this most certainly involves judgements and disagreements about how to weight the requirements.

> Real science takes time, centuries (even millenia) to be exact, and
> there are plenty of disagreements.

There are very few disagreements about science because it works by pooling knowledge and consensus. In order to have a disagreement it would be necessary to have two or more different models that fit all the relevant observations and for different groups to have a reason to prefer one instead of the other. This is rare.

I suspect much that you might be considering to be disagreement about science is not about what has been scientifically established but about hypotheses that external interests would claim/like to be scientifically established even though they fail under the scientific method. The classical example was perhaps a wide range of religous beliefs but today a great many interests seek the credibility that science can bring.

To take an audiophile example, there is no scientific disagreement about the sound of audiophile cables. No valid observations have been put forward that disagree with currently established scientific knowledge and no valid alternative hypotheses have been put forward to test against known observations. Science simply has nothing to disagree about although I suspect this is not impression that many audiophiles hold.

> Otherwise it could not proceed and make 'progress'.

Science does not make progress by disagreement. It makes progress by agreement that a model fits all the known observations. It is quite different from, for example, debate where there is no requirement to reach perfect agreement on all aspects to reach a conclusion.

> What 'progress' is in science though is not easy to define.

It is very easy to define because technical journals are the record of what is scientifically established and the evidence that supports it.



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