Science is amazingly reliable compared to any other method of generating knowledge about the world.
It's misleading to talk about science in general in this context, as different sciences have different amount of "kicking back" going on. The more the world kicks back, and the faster it happens, the easier it is for scientists to falsify & iterate. Technology is based on sciences with some of the most testable hypotheses. This doesn't mean (necessarily) that scientific articles are more reliable in those areas, but the unreliable ones are detected faster.
We happen to live in a universe where physical interactions are highly local, and forces generally fall off very quickly with distance. On the typical scales we build things at, the physical laws are also very close to deterministic and can be modeled with high accuracy by simplified models with few entities (e.g. looking at a body as a point particle with mass at its center of mass). There's an anthropic argument about why this should be so somewhere in Feynman, I forget where. Taken all together, this allows very high reproducibility, which enables rapid development of technology by iterated experiments.
Indeed, engineering is distinct from science and contains vast lore all of its own that's not reducible to basic science.
I feel like I've just written a bunch of trivialities.
Indeed, engineering is distinct from science and contains vast lore all of its own that's not reducible to basic science.
To my mind, that's the interesting one. Does the lore ever get fed back into science?
Science is not particularly reliable.
And yet, we have remarkable technology, and can do medical marvels.
My tentative theory is that there's a lot of knowledge that's less formal than science in engineering, manufacturing, and the practice of medicine which makes it possible to get work done, and some fairly effective methods of filtering information that comes from science.