Of course, this is still not good enough. But the nice thing about things that are real is they eventually stand up to increasing levels of self-doubt and 3rd party verification... it’s an extraordinary result (because, of course, the Standard Model seems to be sufficient for just about everything else... so any verified deviation is extraordinary), and so funding shouldn’t be a problem.
A decent heuristic: Real effects are those that get bigger the more careful your experiment is (and the more times it is replicated by careful outsiders), not smaller.
Of course, this is still not good enough. But the nice thing about things that are real is they eventually stand up to increasing levels of self-doubt and 3rd party verification... it’s an extraordinary result (because, of course, the Standard Model seems to be sufficient for just about everything else... so any verified deviation is extraordinary), and so funding shouldn’t be a problem.
A decent heuristic: Real effects are those that get bigger the more careful your experiment is (and the more times it is replicated by careful outsiders), not smaller.