Which, again, would be a fantastically amazing discovery, perhaps the greatest ever in the history of science. A physicist would be salivating at the possibilities.
But iirc it started off with a whole history of physics grad students offing themselves when their experiments didn’t work out or confirmed negative results, not just the one you are referring to.
Maybe you have to rethink this in terms of a computer programmer that knows all his programs will have critical bugs from now on, and there's nothing he can do to avoid it.
I noticed that issue too, and attributed it to Liu blending some historical Asian and possibly Chinese culture into the mix, where large failures result in great shame, loss of face, and sometimes suicide as a means of redeeming oneself.
Though that still happens occasionally in some contexts like business, it’s not realistic for scientists, as you explain. But maybe Liu was taking some artistic and cultural license here, using something that at least has some precedent.
IIRC, the wave of suicides was confined to the members of the club, so they actually knew what was up. On the other hand, there was at least a strong hint that it was going to spread globally, so you have a point there.
On the other hand, this would still destroy a lot of experimentation in the field of particle physics... although I guess it would be interesting to poke at the edges of the effect?
But iirc it started off with a whole history of physics grad students offing themselves when their experiments didn’t work out or confirmed negative results, not just the one you are referring to.