Ed T your quandary regarding truth is a universal one. The word I have come to describe this and advance the multiplicities of truth is Perspectivism. By weighing the cause and history of one person's truth with everyone else within the hive mind focuses and enlarges ever more greater truth. It is a subject unto itself.



Scientific misconceptions can be failed hypothesis, failed reasoning or simply forgetting to convert to metric.
Being right is still not a final perfect conclusion since one may not see how it can still be wrong somewhere within a complex evolving system. I have many examples of this I will not include here.
Being right for the wrong reasons is pretty damn good since none of us are omniscient.

In my book a misconception might just be the best we can do.

It seems to me that our known universe does not even reveal itself as a complete perfect conception. As products of our universe why should we be different.

The best you can hope for are some humble cohesive grams of facts we can add to the weight atop the shoulders of all those who have come before us.




What is genius? It is billions of things but sometimes it is just not ignoring the obvious.
Einstein saw the obvious fact that light relative to its speed exists it a different time scale to those who stand next to a clock.

I say there was a second big bang after the first in which all the opposite Energies, spins vectors and unknowns canceled each other out leaving behind our present light and dark matters which no longer interact beyond gravity. Its obvious.