If Pons & Fleischmann were secretly trying to steer the world away from some real results by discrediting the field with embarrassing false results, it seems like a very risky gamble that still hasn’t fully paid off.
Of course, no-one has found any dangerous results; so if that’s what they were trying to hide, perhaps by leaving a false trail, then they’ve succeeded admirably, sending future researchers up the wrong path.
In real life, I’m pretty sure that nobody has found any dangerous results because there aren’t any dangerous results to find. This doesn’t mean that creating scandals successfully reduces the amount of scientific interest in a topic, it just means that in this case there wasn’t anything to be interested in.
Of course, no-one has found any dangerous results; so if that’s what they were trying to hide, perhaps by leaving a false trail, then they’ve succeeded admirably, sending future researchers up the wrong path.
In real life, I’m pretty sure that nobody has found any dangerous results because there aren’t any dangerous results to find. This doesn’t mean that creating scandals successfully reduces the amount of scientific interest in a topic, it just means that in this case there wasn’t anything to be interested in.