Probably, I'm not familiar with the domain. I'm suggesting their data and publishing practice could be dogshit while their process might still wield a room-temp superconductor, in which case it would be a little unfair to conclude they are fraudsters.
If you take two independent source datasets, A and B, and combine them (add, subtract, whatever) to produce C, then C is correlated to A and B, but A and B are uncorrelated.
So in the paper, there are two datasets D and E, and a third F. The noise in D and E are uncorrelated and the noise in F is correlated [edit: to D and E]. Clearly F is the result of combining D and E. The problem is that D is labeled "raw", E is labeled "final, clean result", and F is labeled "background". Thats... pretty damning. They took raw measurements, added them to a desired result, and claimed the result was "background".
Edit: to my mind, the biggest problem here isn't that an exciting new physics discovery is reversed. It's that so many people show little regard for truth. I'm not speaking to the parent of this post so much as to entire community. In the APS article it says that Rochester
> "'determined that there was no evidence that supported the concerns.' But the university has not made the remit of the investigations public and has not provided any rationale for the investigations or details on how they reached their conclusions."
In regards to clearly plagarized sections in his PhD thesis Rochester also said
> “Dr. Dias has taken responsibility for these errors and is working with his thesis advisor…to amend the thesis.”
Even one of the scientists who uncovered problems with the first 'discovery':
> “'Still, I don’t want to believe [the allegations] because it’s too serious,' Eremets says. He would prefer the field simply forget about the irreproducible CSH result and move on."
