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 wa

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.