I seem to remember something about the scientist being distraught because physics didn't make sense, not because she was having trouble getting clean data.

That also stuck with me as weird: there are any number of places you could sabotage a precision physics experiment by injecting tiny amounts of noise, which would drive the scientists to think they were bad scientists. Instead they thought science was broken.

As someone who has looked for inconsistencies with the Standard Model for a while now, and seen every measurement land bang-on the prediction, I can say that I would love any deviation that said our existing theories are broken.

And sure, crank up the detector noise and we'd be sad, but ask any grad student: having your apparatus suddenly spit out garbage data is just an average day. I've known plenty of scientists with psychological problems but it's never coming from their data.

> I've known plenty of scientists with psychological problems but it's never coming from their data.

I want to read a spinoff of the Three-Body Problem with this premise.