Science Quote by David Douglass

“Scientific truth by consensus” is an intentionally barbed phrase: it takes a process most people associate with legitimacy (agreement) and reframes it as a warning label. Douglass, speaking as a physicist, is leaning on science’s own mythology of heroic dissent. The line works because it compresses a familiar history lesson into a moral: when knowledge is decided by social alignment rather than empirical friction, science starts acting like a guild.

The subtext isn’t that consensus is always wrong; it’s that consensus is a category error when treated as a truth-maker instead of a lagging indicator. In physics, “truth” is supposed to survive contact with reality: predictive power, reproducibility, and the stubbornness of measurements. Consensus is what forms after those checks, and it can also form for less noble reasons: career incentives, peer review conservatism, funding fashions, and the human tendency to defend sunk costs. Douglass’s “uniformly bad history” is rhetorical overkill, but that overreach is part of the point: he’s puncturing the lazy appeal to majority belief as if science were a parliament.

Context matters: this kind of line usually surfaces when a field becomes politicized or institutionally rigid, and dissenters feel dismissed with “the science is settled.” Douglass is staking out a boundary: science should be persuasive because it is testable, not because it is popular. The sting is aimed less at scientists than at the way institutions and media translate provisional, probabilistic work into a consensus badge meant to end arguments.