Pretty much all human interaction is trust based.
Only if you can't do that do you start to trust and build off it.
This scientific process of embedded mutual distrust is one of the most successful, generative, and important institutions humanity has ever created.
But most scientists trust the peer review process and base their work on their own ideas and the ideas/results they read in journals.
In short, scientists trust other scientists.
But it is critically important that we can periodically check in and verify that our trust is still well placed, and not have systems that can allow someone to massively profit from violating people's trust.
The stronger those foundations and verifications of trust are, the better off we all are as a society.
I never suggested that every scientist independently and recursively verify every piece of previous work. Work and verification of work builds on each other. And every once in a while, we have a major milestone that verifies that much of the work that went into accomplishing the milestone (such as the moon landing) is generally correct.
That's how we teach science to people. It's not just "here's the math and the science we know and it's totally right, just trust us bro". We say "here's the math and science we think is right, now let's do experiments along the way to periodically verify that the things we're teaching you actually generate real predictions that match reality".
Science is all about being suspicious and verifying. Many (if not all) of the greatest scientific discoveries came from people questioning the established "truth".
Right- that's called trust. I can't independently launch my own lunar program, so I trust those that did... did.
We really don't. There's so much stupid stuff that gets published on the daily.
And then, you publish a paper refuting a lot of the nonsense, and people start citing your paper as evidence of the opposite of what you wrote, just because you had a keyword in your abstract and they didn't read it, just needed a citation. It's mind boggling that we aren't going backwards in science.
Did you (or your lab members) publish contradictory results, or should I just trust this assessment?
That is the “optimistic” Popperian take on science—aka good science. The reality is a different matter ;-)