Agreed. There are plenty of stories in physics where researchers reported some effect which was found later to be due to an error setting up the experiment. Are

Agreed. There are plenty of stories in physics where researchers reported some effect which was found later to be due to an error setting up the experiment. Are they supposed to face fraud charges because of this? Researchers will just quit and go work in the industry or something. And there are plenty of fields where you have different interpretations of the same data (see the entire field of economics, also plenty in physics and other fields). Should the people who espoused ether theory be sued for fraud? It'll be a huge mess because doing research is by definition doing something unprecedented.