This comment is largely a variant on the usual "science is just another belief like religion". It really isn't. The far fringes of science that you need lots of eduction and tools to work with, sure, you need to take those on faith. But you don't have to "believe" them, don't have to take them on faith. Your life is not changed one iota if you personally believe in quantum mechanics or not.
Meanwhile, the bulk of science is in the human scale - you can do a ton of scientific experiments with the stuff in your house right now. There's this misconception that 'science=theoretical physics' and it's just not so. You don't need to trust that gravitational acceleration on earth is 9.8m/s/s, you can determine that yourself, easily. You don't even have to use meters or seconds - use your own units. You will find that it works out the same anyway.
You can work out science from first principles and get a long way - the difference here with religion is that in religion, the first principles are not accessible to anyone. "This book is holy because I was told it was holy". There's no way to verify the initial state and work through from there.
Trying to paint science as this thing that exists only in our heads and investigating only the really tiny (quantum mechanics) or the really large (astrophysics) misses the vast bulk of the science we use as humans - the stuff that's been tested again and again through use. The edge of science is where you'll find conjecture, and hence a lot of trappings that sound like religion, but that's not the whole of science, not by a long shot.
> You can work out science from first principles and get a long way - the difference here with religion is that in religion, the first principles are not accessible to anyone.
i think that's exactly the point i made, actually.
It read to me more that you were saying that science is about invisible woo just like religion is, it's just that the practitioners aren't about rituals or rhetoric.
In particular, your last sentence says that science is about mutual trust and good faith - when in fact it is much less about that than religion. You don't have to have mutual trust to do science since you can work it out all the way from first principles. Science aims to be robust enough that you don't have to trust other people. Good science has different groups repeating the same experiment multiple times, to better ensure that the effect is observable, and not based on trust or faith. Yes, at the cutting edge, you might have to use trust more when there's only one or two groups with the capacity for doing the testing, but ideally you have multiple groups specifically to avoid relying on trust and faith.
That knowledge then trickles down to applied science, where it's field-tested. A materials scientist at a widget company doesn't trust a theoretical scientist - they'll take the latter's study, make their own prototypes, and check the stuff works as suggested.
Science is not about trust and faith or defined by them; we just use them as humans to facilitate sharing knowledge on the experimental edge.
Faith and good faith are different things. Good faith is the dual of trust: it is being sincere in communication and actions. It's actually a weird term because "faith" is an extreme, uncritical form of trust while "good faith" is behavior that is worth trusting.
The trust that is essential to science is believing that someone else who attempts to reproduce your results and failed is sincerely trying to reproduce your results. Mistrust would be issues like rejecting someone's results with accusations of fraud or incompetence.
The good faith that is essential to science is trying one's best to reproduce results and making one's own experiments easily reproducible. An example of bad faith would be deliberately obfuscating sources of data.
Your example exemplifies trust and good faith: the materials scientist assumes the theoretical scientist is produced their study in good faith. If they have difficulties reproducing the results, they would try to communicate with the theoretical scientist and others in an attempt to clarify the discrepancy between their experiments. This cannot possibly work without mutual trust and good faith in the act of doing science.
In contrast, the way religious beliefs are developed and propagated is not usually rooted in trust and good faith. It can be when it is unhierarchical and rooted in personal experience, but in organized religion it is not. Religion is a hierarchy of authority on truth. Instead of trust, we have obedience. Instead of good faith, we have righteousness.
The first half of my comment was contrasting "things i believe that i call scientific knowledge" and "the act of doing science". There are more distinctions I briefly alluded to: "the social organization of science", "the economic structure of science", "ownership over scientific knowledge", etc. We can even have science about science, analyzing any of these particular facets. Many facets, but they come together as a whole. No one has a pure conception of science. All of these facets are inextricably related. I think it's important to distinguish "scientific beliefs" and being "scientific".
Lots of people claim to be rational, or scientific based on their beliefs. To me, this is clearly incomplete. It is easy to fool someone with dressings of scientific language or pantomimed motions that look like scientific actions. Good science is mixed up with "bad" science, which is a strange term because bad science is clearly not science by definition. One trap that i see people often fall into is feeling that their beliefs are rational/scientific and meeting someone with conflicting ideas, then attributing "irrationality" or "unscientific" nature to that person. Maybe it's a strawman that lives only in my head. I think it happens an awful lot. It's happened to me, at least.
Meanwhile, the bulk of science is in the human scale - you can do a ton of scientific experiments with the stuff in your house right now. There's this misconception that 'science=theoretical physics' and it's just not so. You don't need to trust that gravitational acceleration on earth is 9.8m/s/s, you can determine that yourself, easily. You don't even have to use meters or seconds - use your own units. You will find that it works out the same anyway.
You can work out science from first principles and get a long way - the difference here with religion is that in religion, the first principles are not accessible to anyone. "This book is holy because I was told it was holy". There's no way to verify the initial state and work through from there.
Trying to paint science as this thing that exists only in our heads and investigating only the really tiny (quantum mechanics) or the really large (astrophysics) misses the vast bulk of the science we use as humans - the stuff that's been tested again and again through use. The edge of science is where you'll find conjecture, and hence a lot of trappings that sound like religion, but that's not the whole of science, not by a long shot.