[dekhn]

the only good papers are the ones that survive multiple rounds of critiquing from a wide range of experts. Even great papers have problems, the point of journal clubs is to argue out all the varying reasonable lines (not the fringe ones) of ways the paper could be making a false conclusion (typically due to bad experimental technique or mistaken data analysis).

[mannykannot]

How would that have worked out in the example you have given, prior to a successful delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment? Would Bell's theorem have been consigned to the scrap heap? Would delayed-choice quantum eraser experiments then have been performed when they were?

By these standards, Darwin should have been rejected on the grounds of his faulty model of biological inheritance.

There needs to be some slack, because sometimes critics are more convincing than they are right.

[dekhn]

No, the point of delayed choice quantum eraser is that it's the first really simple experimental setup that non-physicists can understand, and see how it violates the simple assumption of classical physics. It's sort of the Hershey Chase experiment, but for QM. If DCQE hadn't been done, Bell would have been fine, as the last of the no-loophole experiments are being run now.

[mcint]

To compress further, journal clubs [war game a paper's methods, results, and conclusions], so to speak.