Science

In my field (physical chemistry) we build on each other's work. We often measure similar or even the same systems, and apply other people's models to our own. We are usually not going to go out of our way to re-do the experiment that someone else has already done, but when we do our own experiments we confirm whether our observations agree with what we expect based on what is already published in the literature. If they don't, we might actually try to replicate those previous experiments, and at the very least we will point out the inconsistencies in our publications. Through this process "bad" results erode over time.