Exactly. The “cold fusion” debacle wasn’t their fault it was everyone around them, they were following a simple chain of research, incrementally developing their theories, following in the proud tradition of discovery after going “huh that’s odd” … and because it challenged established orthodoxy they got buried.
We had a partial repeat of this with the whole faster than light neutrinos, with lots of partially informed commentary, but for the most part these researchers were lucky their situation was obviously instrumental error soon enough, had it continued to be a discrepancy much longer, I have no doubt the conversation would have devolved.
We also have the Venus phosphene research work which gets a lot of pushback because it doesn’t fit so it much be a mistake, and it’s taken a lot of hard methodical work just to get the consensus to “this requires more research”.
Then we have the complete debacle around the emdrive … which is simply summed up as, no it didn’t work, but it should not have taken years to prove that. When someone has a theory that doesn’t fit, based on some (albeit weak) experimental evidence, you don’t refute it by simply saying “your wrong because existing physics is correct”… you do it by proving your own theory about why the experiment shows the results, or by performing alternative experiments that eliminate more variables… what we got instead was a tiny community of true believers, an tiny community of open minded scientists trying to do good experimental scientific research and didn’t care if the end result was the device doesn’t work, because it was good scientific work to develop better metrology techniques to measure the effects that were claimed… and then all the other scientists falling for the circular reasoning fallacy. “It can’t work because physics says so”… as if that somehow negates the possibility that we might have found some new physics, by doing an experiment, finding conflicting results, and diligently performing experiments to understand what’s going on… which is deeply ironic to me as one of the favourite headlines in the particle physics world is a variation on “hints at new physics” … the physics community wants new physics… just not this new physics. (Once again, I do know it didn’t work, and never worked, I’m angry about how the physics community reacted to this)
Essentially it seems like how shocking/surprising the new results are, the more push back they get, so publicity stunts or high visibility publication or press releases is correlated with the level of push back from the wider scientific community. Effectively the acceptance of the scientific community is like a non-Newtonian fluid.
The EM Drive debacle I think exactly contradicts your point. It was an extremely weak effect that required extraordinary shielding to measure to any extent at all, there were numerous sources of potential error - and it would have contradicted some of the most basic laws of physics.
The onus should have been 100% on the EM drive team to prove this extraordinary claim with extraordinary evidence, there was absolutely no reason to waste time and resources on investigating their claim until they had produced something akin to a modern Michelson-Morley experiment, especially in terms of care taken to isolate their system.
We build gigantic machines costing millions and billions of dollars and decades of work, like the the large hadron collider, the LIGO and VIRGO gravitational wave observatories… all in search of exactly the kind of “weak effect” you are dismissing … these are things so far below our normal day to day experience of the universe that the results may never be of anything but theoretical or academic value in my entire lifetime. No future car or bike or computer or microwave oven, is likely to benefit from us knowing more about the Higgs boson or from our enhanced understanding of collisions between neutron stars and black holes in the far away cosmos.
This particular minuscule effect, while eventually proven to be measurement error had the potential to deliver significant practical effects on human life today, even if only by way of significant improvements in the cost of maintaining spacecraft orbits, which has knock on effects in the cost of building and operating services that rely on satellite communications and data, from weather forecasts to the new iPhone emergency satellite messaging and networks like Starlink.
Not only that but the effort to nail down the measurements has direct applications to the metrology of powered RF systems where the RF power and system thermal loading are dominant components of the sum of forces, which has potential future impacts on measurement and calibration of tiny sensors and micro-electromechanical systems in general, with potential applications to lab methods regarding macro scale quantum mechanical effect research in future decades …
Because good science is built one brick at a time pilled higher and high on all the previous good science we have collectively done.
My point was actually to highlight that by simply reducing the argument to “this contradicts what we know to be true therefore it cannot work, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar/stupid/misinformed/misguided/etc” they are not doing bad science, but simply not doing science at all in the first place!
Choosing to reject a contrary result is cherry picking the data, rejecting the possibility of such data having worth is doubling down on your cherry picking to squash your error bars.
If the data doesn’t fit past theoretical predictions you are either measuring it wrong because you have more to learn about measurement or you may have just discovered something amazing that will change physics. Anything else isn’t scientific… it’s arguing over economic value allocation of time and money.
We had a partial repeat of this with the whole faster than light neutrinos, with lots of partially informed commentary, but for the most part these researchers were lucky their situation was obviously instrumental error soon enough, had it continued to be a discrepancy much longer, I have no doubt the conversation would have devolved.
We also have the Venus phosphene research work which gets a lot of pushback because it doesn’t fit so it much be a mistake, and it’s taken a lot of hard methodical work just to get the consensus to “this requires more research”.
Then we have the complete debacle around the emdrive … which is simply summed up as, no it didn’t work, but it should not have taken years to prove that. When someone has a theory that doesn’t fit, based on some (albeit weak) experimental evidence, you don’t refute it by simply saying “your wrong because existing physics is correct”… you do it by proving your own theory about why the experiment shows the results, or by performing alternative experiments that eliminate more variables… what we got instead was a tiny community of true believers, an tiny community of open minded scientists trying to do good experimental scientific research and didn’t care if the end result was the device doesn’t work, because it was good scientific work to develop better metrology techniques to measure the effects that were claimed… and then all the other scientists falling for the circular reasoning fallacy. “It can’t work because physics says so”… as if that somehow negates the possibility that we might have found some new physics, by doing an experiment, finding conflicting results, and diligently performing experiments to understand what’s going on… which is deeply ironic to me as one of the favourite headlines in the particle physics world is a variation on “hints at new physics” … the physics community wants new physics… just not this new physics. (Once again, I do know it didn’t work, and never worked, I’m angry about how the physics community reacted to this)
Essentially it seems like how shocking/surprising the new results are, the more push back they get, so publicity stunts or high visibility publication or press releases is correlated with the level of push back from the wider scientific community. Effectively the acceptance of the scientific community is like a non-Newtonian fluid.