> If there were a serious bug in the code used in ATLAS, do you think that the scientists on the project would have been equally diligent in finding and fixing

> If there were a serious bug in the code used in ATLAS, do you think that the scientists on the project would have been equally diligent in finding and fixing that bug if it made a Higgs boson appear where it didn't actually occur than if it hid the appearance of the Higgs boson? Actually, the scientists trick themselves by injecting fake signals to avoid bias on their part. So they have that covered. They're well aware at how badly one can goof up when looking for a really rare signal. The statistical standards they set are incredibly high. The more completely scientists are able to control the experimental conditions, the better science works. Things like psychology end up probing an extremely complex system (our brains) with a lot of constraints on what they can do for obvious, ethical reasons. Add in a side of politicization of certain results and you end up with a larger amount of replication problems than you would in particle physics where we can carefully isolate effects on significantly simpler systems.