No. It’s true that some new things like fashion and music are just new for the sake of being new and often aren’t better than what’s come before, but science isn’t like that – it really is true that we have a better model of how things work than before in all fields of science. And we can measure this concretely in terms of actual predictions. I think part of the problem with the public seeing science as fickle and changing willy-nilly is that a lot of science news reporting is on new unverified findings like cold fusion and such and when these fail to be replicated, people interpret this as failures of science rather than science just working like it should. And what are these “vexing problems that science has not dealt with”?
