Good Science? Bad Science? What do these mean? How do we know the difference? We throw these terms around especially in political and policy arguments as if we all understand what they mean. Exceptions. Uncertainty. Facts. Theory. Bias. These ideas seem to determine whether or not we think any particular scientific idea is good or bad. Do we have the right idea, or is Science really about something else. A friend of mine once said that science is about or should be about disproving things. He was particularly concerned with a few ideas that have become doctrine-like (a way of testing orthodoxy) among scientists, but many people share that view. That perspective is that a great unwashed barbarian horde of people are throwing out ideas left and right, some good, most not, and the job of the educated scientist-judges is to determine which ideas can take their place as orthodoxy for the education of the current generation of students.
The reality of the process of science is very different and very much more broad than that. First, science is a method of collecting and evaluating a specific set of data points for the purposes of making a generalizable conclusion that can be used by others.
Science is about producing knowledge that can be used for the improvement of society. It is not simply an evaluation method for people to judge which ideas can be considered true. Science is a force of progress because of its ability to produce knowledge in such a way as to encourage even more knowledge to be produced.
Just for an example, let's consider a short history of the science of gravity. People have always known about gravity, the force than pulls things downward, but explaining it has been the challenge. Aristotle used the science of his day to explain gravity as the tendancy of things to always seek out their lowest possible potential energy state (not the terms he would have used, of course). Aristotle's ideas along with the ideas of others helped the Romans build the great systems of aquaducts to provide clean water to their growing cities improving public health. About 1900 years later, Gallileo worked out a better more generalized theory of motion that included inertia and could be applied to all motion, not just on the Earth (although even he didn't realize it at the time). [ad name="Adsense Small Horz Banner"] In the next century, Issac Newton used Gallileo's ideas on motion to describe the force of gravity that explained the motion of bodies in the solar system. He also improved the mathematics of the theory of motion and forces, which formed the basis of much of modern physics. A few hundred years later, Albert Einstein would correct Newton's ideas on motion and gravity to include relativity and the relationships between mass, energy, time, and gravity.
In each case, the previous knowledge or theory that was generated by the scientist was not being disproved, but corrected. Each theory, from Aristotle to Einstein was actually used by engineers, mathematicians, other scientists, and inventors to make advances that affected people's lives. The scientists created knowledge (a theory about how the world worked) that allowed others to create new works, new machines, and new methods of doing things improving life for everyone. From the Roman works of engineering (dependent on Aristotle) to at last Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites (dependent on Einstein), few of these advances would have been possible if all we knew was trial and error. There are just too many errors we could imagine. And, what is even more interesting, many of those theories when the scientists created them seemed useless to the public, and even occasionally to other scientists.