This concept is misleading, as there is a tremendous body of science that has been built up and is self consistent. The things that change rapidly are mostly new observations, hypotheses, and theories, or minor refinements to existing knowledge. But they’re still based on the same vast scientific background.
Asimov’s essay is great, and highly recommended. An example he gives is flat earth to spherical earth to oblate spheroid earth to “oblate spheroid plus minor variations north to south” earth. But each refinement was not nearly as major as the previous one. Newtonian physics is still valid in most cases; you have to go to really extreme conditions for relativity to be needed to describe it.
This doesn’t mean that major upheavals won’t come along occasionally.
