If I'm understanding you correctly, you are unhappy because if we dig deeply enough, we reach a point where we still have unknowns? Obviously, scientists are working on every unknown we have, and obviously as soon as we have an answer we will have an underly "why" regarding that.
Can you explain how that leads you to a belief in a flat Earth?
Unknowns that don't get acknowledged as unknowns, the fact there are barely even hypotheses to fill in huge gaps in the underlying basics of major models is something you pretty much never hear about when you'd think it ought to be much more important.
It led me to question, the same as everything else. Questioning and re-evaluating and following the gaps led to the conclusion of FET.
I'm sorry, but yes, the scientific method is absolutely being followed in research today. For the better part of 20 years I've worked with scientists from most disciplines, and the rigors have never been tighter. There absolutely are cases of garbage research getting through peer review, and absolutely we're human with all the shortcomings that entails. The scientific method, peer review, etc., is designed exactly with those shortcomings in mind. If you publish some results, you have to lay out in extreme detail how you got those results so others can replicate it, falsify it, or attempt the same experiment with changed variables.
Yes, if you submit an article that mentions FE you will absolutely get rejected. Why? Because that's not at all how the scientific method works. At all. It's not the flat Earth that gets rejected, it's because of the mountains of other solid science that must also get rejected. If you want FE to become accepted, you have to do that actual work, and that means showing experimentally that some observed phenomenon does not jibe with what we know of the Earth's surface right now. It means you have to address every argument against your position and account for it in your paper. You then have to submit it for peer review where experts will tell you where or if you've done something wrong (with citations), and you have to look up all that previous research and account for it experimentally.
You can't walk into a scientific discipline and announce that you're going to change everything we know about the physical sciences without doing all the insanely tedious work that every other scientist has to do for a paper that might modify one little aspect of what we know. You've got to start small and be just as rigorous.
Yep, there's rigor, I said as much, it's just overzealous. Like you say, mention FET and it'd be rejected because the conclusion is accepted as false. You just assumed that the paper wouldn't contain evidence, even when we're talking about something hypothetical. That's the bias of mainstream science,
you've made up your minds. Some things now are just treated as tradition, the weight of evidence thought too much when that's not how evidence works. The same piece of evidence can point to a multitude of models. We do all the work you just assume we don't, you just don't want to hear it. Listen to yourself. You cannot claim the scientific establishment is open to alternative ideas when you assume a set narrative for said alternative ideas.
Further, the criteria you mention. 'Address every argument against your position,' that's impossible for anything. Most papers generally just do most, and often get some other scientist writing up a rebuttal which may or may not be responded to. But look at how it would function in this case, look at the number of objections people raise to FET by sheer argument from exhaustion. So all the responses get compiled in one place, listed out with typical scientific rigour, just as the
support for a paper on whole other disciplines. Miss one, or one slip your minds, it gets thrown out for that minor oversight regardless of the merit of the rest. And that's assuming anyone is going to bother with the topic, given the attitude you've already presented; they've made up their minds before they turn the first page.
To say nothing of finding a publication willing to house an article that long. If anything you'd need to split it up into two, or even three or four, but again then no one would meet your criteria. The angle of "FET can work, if we assume ___ and ___, which I'll prove later," is beyond niche and would be ignored, and the proof of said principles is, by your words, inadmissible without all the backing explanation.
If you want to question any of science's grand traditions, the system is geared to ensure it's impossible. Even if the papers would get a fair hearing, which they won't because of the biases of human beings, there's nothing that'd listen to all the various points. You just have to pray that the things you've built on are true. If they're not, you now have no way to fix it, you're just nipping and tucking and tweaking later additions. It's fruit of the poisoned tree.
I'm sorry, but this is absolutely not how any of this works. I understand it may seem that way from the outside, but it's simply not what happens. For instance, "try drumming up the money for anything claiming 'Einstein was wrong' and you're treated as a crackpot" is completely incorrect. Every few months I read a paper about a new experiment taking a shot at Einstein, so that's simply not true. But the larger point is exactly how you phrased it - You don't get a grant for trying to prove Einstein wrong. You get a grant for trying a novel, useful, experiment that might either bolster Einstein or prove him wrong. That would absolutely get funded. But part of the grant process is showing how your experiment is novel - you have to show no one else has done anything like it, or you're measuring in a new way, or maybe you've found an error in a calculation someone else has done that you think this experiment will rectify. Doing that requires really knowing what has been done in the field before, understanding why the people in the field have come to the conclusions they have, and being able to address those issues simply and directly.
By the way, there is an insane amount of double checking. On things that don't have much of a broader implication, maybe not much. But for things that might have repercussions, the double-checking becomes a bloodsport.
They're not experiments aimed towards a pillar, they're inevitably claims and theories geared towards tweaking or refining. The fact you need to dress up the pitch with evasive terminology to avoid saying what's actually going on should tell you plenty. Sure, propose testing something that hasn't been tested; my stand-by there is always whether the rate of change of gravity in the vertical direction is continuous or discontinuous. The response is "Ok, why are you examining that? Why do you doubt it?" So you've got to either evade with an unsatisfactory 'I just want to see' or go through the untouchable topic of FET on which they've already made up their mind.
It's not repurcussions that matter, it's credibility, and anything too far from the mainstream lacks it on principle. That's science, you have the accepted facts, you have a grey area around that of competing theories, beyond that current hypotheses, beyond that a little wiggle room, and then beyond that there's what you get if you start from challenging an 'accepted fact' and if that's where you begin, that's as far as you go.
So the takeaway is this: Before you propose the Earth is flat, conduct experiments that support it. Before you conduct experiments, learn all the relevant experiments that have come before so you can speak knowledgeably about how your experiment is novel and perhaps better. Follow those steps, and if your research is flawless, you will upset the applecart and every scientist will take you seriously.
I'm not a child. Maybe look at how you assume how dumb we are before you claim you don't have a predetermined view of FET.