"Flawless logic" in here: > Lots of arguments do turn out to be wrong. To get an idea of how many, Ord and his colleagues looked at the proportion of published

"Flawless logic" in here: > Lots of arguments do turn out to be wrong. To get an idea of how many, Ord and his colleagues looked at the proportion of published scientific papers that are eventually retracted. Using Medline as their source, they found it to be around 1 in 10,000. Given that Medline covers mostly top-ranking journals, they estimate the error rate for all journals to be more like 1 in 1000, which suggests a fairly high chance of error in any argument. And remember, scientists often don't publish painful and embarrassing retractions unless forced, so the true rate may be even higher. < It's true. Studies have shown the error rate of physics papers to be 1 in 10000. But that was only high-quality papers, for the average paper we estimate it to be 1 in 1000 or more. Also, physicists are self-absorbed egomaniacs who would only admit a mistake if their professional reputation depended on it, so the true error rate is at least 1 in 100 in fact. 1 in 10 if it's about string theory, which I don't understand anyway.