The role of prejudice in scientific progress

 I’m currently reading Black Holes and Time Warps; Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy by Kip A. Thorne, published in 1994. Despite the subject matter, it’s very readable, and virtually gives a history of the topic by someone who was more than just an observer, but a participant.
 
What I find curious is how everyone involved, including Einstein, Oppenheimer and Wheeler, had their own prejudices, some of which were later proven incorrect. None of these great minds were infallible. And one shouldn’t be surprised by this, given they were all working on the very frontier of physics and astrophysics in particular.
 
And surely that means that some of my prejudices will eventually be proven wrong. I expect so, even if I’m not around to acknowledge them. Science works because people’s prejudices can be overturned, which always requires a certain cognitive dissonance. As Freeman Dyson remarked in one his Closer-to-Truth interviews with Robert Lawrence Kuhn, every question answered by science invariably poses more questions, so it’s part of the process.
 
Of course, I’m not even a scientist, but a self-described spectator on the boundary of ideas. So why should I take myself seriously? Because, over time, my ideas have evolved and I’ve occasionally had insights that turned out to be true. One of these was confirmed in the reading of Thorne’s book. In a not-so-recent post, The fabric of the Universe, I attempted to resolve the paradox that an external observer to someone falling into a black hole sees them frozen in time, whereas the infalling subject experiences no such anomaly. I concluded that space itself falls into the black hole at the speed of light.
 
It so happens that a little-known postdoc, David Finkelstein, wrote a paper effectively coming to the same conclusion – only a lot more rigorously – in 1958, when I was still in primary school. The thing is that people like Penrose, Oppenheimer and Wheeler were convinced, though it had stumped them. In fact, according to Thorne, Wheeler took longer to be convinced. Thorne himself wrote an article in Scientific American in 1967, describing it by using diagrams showing a 2-D ‘fabric’ dragging ants into the hole, while they 'rolled balls’ away at the speed-of-light. At the event horizon the balls were exactly the same speed as the fabric, but in the opposite direction. Therefore, to the external observer, they were never ‘received’, but to the ants, the balls were travelling at the speed-of-light relative to them. Paradox solved. Note it was solved more than 60 years before I worked it out for myself.
 
And this is the thing: I need to work things out for myself, which is why I stick to my prejudices until I’m convinced that I’m wrong. But, to be honest, that’s what scientists do (I emphasise, I’m not a scientist) and that’s how science works. I contend that there is a dialectic between science and philosophy, where philosophy addresses questions that science can’t currently answer, but when it does, it asks more questions, so it’s neverending.