In the case of gravitational waves, back in the 1970s, hundreds of independent research groups constructed simple devices to measure them and they all compared their results. Each research group thought that it had measured gravitational waves, but when the results were combined, they all had to conclude that no one had been measuring gravitational waves. They had all been measuring different sources of noise.
So far as I can tell, this is not in fact true. E.g., this article about Joseph Weber says that Weber claimed to have measured gravitational waves, lots of other labs tried to replicate his results, and they all said they hadn’t been able to. So does this one. The latter cites this paper in Physical Review Letters in which one pair of collaborators say exactly that. Here’s another article saying the same. I haven’t found anything that claims that everyone thought they had found gravitational waves, or that combining everyone’s results made it plain that that wasn’t so.
(I also remark that the story you tell in this paragraph is awfully similar to the one you want to debunk. Lots of scientific observations so noisy that you can’t get anything reliable from any of them, but when you put them together you get something usable. This is exactly what you poke fun at at, e.g., the start of your “Weber’s ghost” post. Surely you can’t consider that approach valid when it says “no gravitational waves here” but invalid when it says “gravitational waves here”...)
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So far as I can tell, this is not in fact true. E.g., this article about Joseph Weber says that Weber claimed to have measured gravitational waves, lots of other labs tried to replicate his results, and they all said they hadn’t been able to. So does this one. The latter cites this paper in Physical Review Letters in which one pair of collaborators say exactly that. Here’s another article saying the same. I haven’t found anything that claims that everyone thought they had found gravitational waves, or that combining everyone’s results made it plain that that wasn’t so.
(I also remark that the story you tell in this paragraph is awfully similar to the one you want to debunk. Lots of scientific observations so noisy that you can’t get anything reliable from any of them, but when you put them together you get something usable. This is exactly what you poke fun at at, e.g., the start of your “Weber’s ghost” post. Surely you can’t consider that approach valid when it says “no gravitational waves here” but invalid when it says “gravitational waves here”...)