Yet science is still conducted by human beings and as complex physical and mental organisms, how well do we know when we are stuck in a rut?

Science has become an enormous group effort and while the resulting hive mind can be far more objective than any one person, can it also perpetuate and institutionalize certain biases?

For example, as you say, math is a hard science, yet is this clarity a form of bias? Sometimes careful study of the details blinds us to the larger picture.

Math is abstraction, yet many in the field seem to treat it as fundamental to the underlaying reality. The map versus territory issue. To the point that some tend to see it as platonic, rather than emergent with the processes and patterns it models. If we boil a body down to the hard stuff, what is left is the skeleton, not the egg.

For example, epicycles really were brilliant math, as a clear and predictively accurate description of our view of the cosmos, but the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation, because we are not at the center of the cosmos.

Is space fundamentially three dimensional, or is that a mapping device, like longitude, latitude and altitude?

It would seem to me that if all physical properties were removed from space, the remaining non-physical properties would be infinity and equilibrium.

Infinity, because there is nothing to bound or otherwise define it and equilibrium would seem to be implicit in Special Relativity, as the frame with the longest ruler and fastest clock would be closest to the equilibrium of the vacuum. The unmoving void of absolute zero.

As opposed to a frame moving at the speed of light, where both measures of space and time are reduced to zero.

Is time the point of the present, moving past to future, that we experience as a sequence of perceptions, necessary for mobile organisms to navigate? Which physics codifies as measures of duration.

Or is it change, turning future to past. As in tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

In which case, there is no literal "dimension" of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

So that time is an effect of activity, similar to other such effects, as temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but they are not considered dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, not the sequence of thought.

Time is asymmetric, because it is a measure of action and action is inertial. The earth only turns one direction. Entropy is not what is measured and is a second order effect.

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.

Society needs everyone playing by the same rules, using the same measures, so there might seem to be an overall Newtonian flow of time, rather than levels of activity in this physical state we refer to as the present, but that is also a product of perception.

Yet I can readily attest that pointing out these observations only offends those certified members of science. They don't really try to question or refute it, only wag the finger of authority and wave the holy talisman of math.

I could go on, but I'm just testing your allegiances.