"The study failed to replicate" is something I often hear, usually with the implication the original study must have been bad, or had something wrong with it. This is a bad misunderstanding of what failure to replicate means.
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I think the crucial difference here is that by 2000 dozens of other labs besides Cornell and Wieman had ALSO made BEC. A better physics analogue to modern crises would be a genuinely ambiguous case like the "supersolid" thing.
In the counterfactual world where that hadn't happened, it wouldn't change the point: failure to immediately replicate != bad. Consider if the analogous thing happened with the Higgs.
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I think this is a case where it's risky to generalize too much from physics. The tightly controlled nature of physics experiments and the high statistical certainty obtained thereby makes "problem with the original" much less likely than for a p=0.049 psych study.
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I disagree. See the other in-thread example, Harry Collins on the Q of sapphire. It's that tacit knowledge and hard-to-control elements often make replication really, really hard.
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