This is one of the best replies and overall philosophies I've ever read online in any forum or website. SO many people, without a doubt the overwhelming majority, will form their conclusions based on their opinions. This is known as confirmation bias, as an official term used in debate and/or the void of the scientific method being followed rigorously.
At some point, who knows how long ago, humans started forfeiting their autonomy by the appeal to authority complex, either deferring to a personality figure as an intellectual deity (and thus removing the burden of proof and observation from themselves), or they merely go with the crowd for lack of care or abundance of apathy (parents, teachers, radio show hosts, etc. share their life lens for them).
The dispassionate adherence to weighing out fact from fiction via repeatable demonstrable and measurable efforts is the only key that unlocks any mystery, and should always be applied in equal measures with a skeptical mind that isn't seeking to derive or arrive at any predetermined supposition.
Of course this is a method of self and intellectual conduct that expands far beyond the aquarium hobby, and has been the single biggest springboard toward success and wisdom in my life overall. Knowing that truth doesn't fear investigation, a quote I live by, is a safe albeit precarious way to live -- because once you encounter someone with concrete opinionation they present as fact or truth, emotions cloud the evidence.
As interesting as this is, and we don't have the time to do this full subject justice, but as one small proof positive of the total abandonment from the classical and unchanged scientific theory, by way of a food-for-thought exercise only (without making or assuming origins or conclusions) there are countless things we 'believe' on faith, that have been cleverly crafted into fact, yet don't withstand the rigors of forensic and empirical data. One such example is the motion and shape of the earth. Again, this is merely for illustrative purposes, however it highlights in the most overt way, our collective (as a species) willingness to accept man's word, absent from verifiable proof, that we're on a tilted, rotating, oblate globular spheroid, shooting through an expanse of space at more than 60,000mph.
These claims have become 'settled science' since Copernican theory was submitted just over 500 years ago, and believe it or not, in all those centuries countless tests and experiments from archaic to hyper-modern (lasers, refraction, light speed tests, etc.) have never once, in any capacity large or small, measured, detected, or even provided a shred of evidence that the 70%+ oceans curve around a spheroid, and/or that we're spinning and shooting at fantastic velocities through an infinite vacuum void.
