Really, this stuff had the characteristics of pathological science even if you didn't have the perspective of actually doing nuclear physics with palladium, and

Really, this stuff had the characteristics of pathological science even if you didn't have the perspective of actually doing nuclear physics with palladium, and barrier penetration on other systems. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20043790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20043790. It was clearly nonsense, on which I'd have put substantial money. I'd also have put money on the apparently superliminal neutrinos of a while back being due to the sort of issue that was eventually found; in contrast, those experimenters deserve credit over their handling of the result. Contrary to the article, you really shouldn't be so open minded that your brains fall out, as they say. Competent experimentalists doubt their own anomalous results, just as the bug is most likely in your code, not the compiler.