The Critical Skeptic and the Scientific Claim

Imagine that you've spent the last few years working to prove a theory. You worked long into the night on countless occasions, sacrificed time with family and friends and had not a few moments where you thought you were going to tear up your research and give up.
Then, finally, you finish your work and submit your results to your peers at the university and wait for their approval to publish, which they finally give, only to have someone come along with evidence that directly refutes what your work claimed. 
What would you do?
This scenario is a common one. Young graduate or PhD students have labored for countless hours only to find that their hypothesis has been neatly disproved by another scientist. One can imagine the internal turmoil and the trashing of offices or labs that might be a symptom of having been proved wrong.
And yet, scientists don't really mind this. Most of the scientific community wants to be proved wrong, because what that means is that they've helped to put in another rung on the ladder to greater discovery. 
This might seem unbelievable, but if you pay close enough attention to any of the scientific educators now prevalent on TV and social media, they almost seem to be excited for someone to come along with a new theory that disproves long-held scientific theories.
From time-to-time, after long hours and huge sacrifices, a discovery comes along that doesn't refute but proves a theory.
For instance, Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity postulated that there are ripples in spacetime. The math was good, but humans had no way to prove this hypothesis until nearly one hundred years later. Scientists at the Laser Interferometer-Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) operated by Cal-Tech and MIT discovered and proved Einstein's prediction by recording these waves from a cataclysmic event in deepest space. When two black holes collided, they sent monstrous ripples through the fabric of spacetime. LIGO has the first-ever recorded evidence of this amazing prediction. Albert Einstein, perhaps the greatest thinker of the last century and certainly the brightest, had his math proved correct by scientists hoping to do just that.

An artistic simulation of the two black holes in question
colliding.

However, the vindication of long-unproved mathematical hypothesis is rather rare. Many more such hypotheses are discarded after having been proved incorrect, however excellent they were in their scientific efficacy.
This is why skepticism is such an important part of the scientific method. We make scientific claims based on evidence collected until those claims are refuted by stronger evidence. It is only by rigorous testing, fact-checking and hours of research that these claims are ever even considered to be viable. 
What if, you may well ask, LIGO had proven Einstein's theory wrong? It would have equally revolutionized the thinking about general relativity.
It must be said that few of the rest of us are scientists in this sense. We don't work at observatories and we don't spend huge portions of our lives sorting out the math to prove or disprove scientific claims.
Still, even in our everyday lives, such claims come to us from a thousand places. There are a million theories a day and many of them seem viable at first glance.
Credulous humans may want to fall into the trap of believing everything they've been told, but the critical skeptic knows better.
Even an extraordinary discovery like the one proving Einstein correct, needs to be scrutinized.
This is why the critical skeptic employs words like, 'apparently' and 'allegedly' and 'supposedly' at all times in these cases.
"Apparently, LIGO has proved Einstein's general relativity theory about spacetime waves correct."
This way, when the next discovery comes along that may disprove further hypotheses made by Einstein, we're ready.
Skepticism is the main motivating factor of scientific discovery. And it also helps us to keep an open mind while continuing the search for truth in all fields of thought and science.