Another thing is is if you do work in fields considered &quot;fringe&quot;. No matter how diligently you follow the scientific method, you&#x27;ll be ridiculed if you find the &quot;wrong&quot; results.<p>I&#x27;ve come to the opinion that scientists are ideologues, but the ideology is based in the current understanding of physics rather than the results of experiments and the scientific method. A famous example is Arago&#x27;s dot (aka Poisson&#x27;s dot), where Freshnel was ridiculed for his wave-based theory of light by Poisson despite the latter not even bothering to do an experiment.