Scientists have to cope with "you just said your model is wrong therefore I am right about everything ever". It makes them sometimes shortcut their way out of conversations that they know will not lead anywhere useful.

which part?

> "therefore I am right about everything ever"

I'm sure scientists have to deal with people jumping on them about their model being wrong, but this part is clearly exaggeration.

That is comic exaggeration, but you've almost certainly heard people insist that the evidence for their position is that some scientist was wrong at some point. It's particularly comic from creationists.

They don't say it with those exact words, but not only would they claim to be right based on when a scientist was once wrong, they are very keen to claim to be right based on what they wrongly think a scientist was once wrong on.

I no longer engage with these people for sport, but about 15-10 years ago I had two scientific creationists that I kept around as virtual pets. one was Hindu and one was from the religion of peace. neither was very stable and both were prone to getting a bit emotional about it.

each time, they would pick one piece of settled science, but they didn't have the mathematical machinery to understand the model itself, so they would rely on the layman cartoon versions and misunderstand something crucial there. for example, the existence of error bars on the concordance plot of radioactive dating. from this they could throw doubt on the whole chronology of the formation of the solar system and the evolution of man. for one of them, a technological civilisation from Hindu mythology existed millions of years ago. for the other, their very peaceful god created everything personally in one go, and evolution by natural selection didn't happen.

> Whenever a scientist says that it's not possible that the model is wrong, then I just roll my eyes.

But no one said that. Im fact, scientists are known to say things like: all models are wrong, but some are useful.

From the article:

> That the three methods disagree “is not telling us about fundamental physics,” Freedman said. “That’s telling us there’s some systematic [error] in one or more of the distance methods.”

Freedman is saying that the model is not wrong.

What she means is that the bar for proving that this is an error in physics is much higher than that of proving that it's a measurement error. Like, if you're measuring acceleration due to gravity, and your sensor/calculation gives you 5m/s^2 rather than the real ~9.81m/s^2 that everything else measures, you can't immediately resort to arguing that physics is wrong, you have to rule out that your sensor/calculation is wrong first.

To argue that the physics is wrong, you are likely to be arguing that very well tested theories like general relativity, special relativity or electromagnetism are off in some way. That's a much higher bar than just the measurements of either the ladder or CMB being wrong in some way.

to add to this, it's equivalent to the difference between trying to justify that one experiment (or one class of experiments) is wrong vs several dozens of classes of thousands of experiments are all subtly wrong so that this one experiment can be right.

And in this case, your sensor isn't giving a wildly wrong answer like 5 m/s^2, but rather something close to the correct answer, like 9.15 m/s^2.

It's easy to think up ways that your sensor could be 5-10% off. It's very difficult to come up with an entirely new theory of gravity that explains everything we observe about the world, but also makes gravity a few percent weaker in this one case.

She's saying that a different model -- one of the three disagreeing methods for distance ladder measurements -- must be wrong, because they disagree with each other. But if one or more of those models are wrong, then there's not much evidence that the LambdaCDM model is wrong.

Conversely, the hypothesis that LambdaCDM is wrong does nothing to explain why the distance ladder methods disagree.

She clearly isn't saying that any model is infallible, she's just saying that clear flaws with one set of models throw into question some specific accusations that a different model is wrong.

You actually need to pay attention to the details; the physicists certainly are. Glib contrarianism isn't very useful here.

That researcher has a personal conviction that the model isn't wrong. That is spurring them to spend the years and decades necessary to assemble the experimental evidence to test the model. Either it'll turn out to be wrong or right in the end, but the conviction is what gives that individual researcher the impetus to keep scratching at the problem for a good chunk of their life.

You shouldn't really roll your eyes at that. They're ultimately doing all the work which will prove it right or wrong. They might wind up not liking the answer they get, but the conviction is necessary to get them there because human emotions are weird.

She's following a hunch, it's what scientists do. In this case the hunch is that the model is not wrong. That's a far cry from saying it's impossible to be wrong.

Where does she say she's following a hunch? She was very certain when she said that.

when she's certain, you'll know, because she'll publish it.