"There is an incentive for scientists to check for errors..." Unless your career, grants and funding are dependent on the validity of the model, or if the mode

"There is an incentive for scientists to check for errors..." Unless your career, grants and funding are dependent on the validity of the model, or if the model is highly politicized. In those cases, there is no incentive for finding errors that undermine the model. Richard Feynmans paper on Cargo Cult Science has a explanation of how Millikans electron charge measurements drifted over time because of measurement bias. In that case, there almost certainly wasn't any politics involved, so the follow on experiments drifted toward a more accurate measurement. But as Feynman indicates in his paper, the fact that the measurements drifted slowly and incrementally, rather than in a corrective step indicates that the scientists who made the follow on measurements were biased towards Millikans' original results - even though his original measurements were not as accurate as the follow on measurements.