There's no such thing as bad publicity; how about in science? If the original paper is proved wrong, how on earth could the original authors get any job and respect from their academic colleagues?
Anyone who is afraid to be wrong shouldn’t entertain the notion of becoming a scientist.
If it turns out they’re wrong, then they will likely do a follow up paper that explains what their mistakes were. No biggy. It’s just a couple of preprints, after all, and it’s widely believed that it was pushed out without all of the authors’ consent in the first place. It won’t leave them with lasting reputational damage from their peers, though it may place slightly more scrutiny on their outputs at a later point.
They may get ridicule from the people who took their paper at face value without noting the informality of the format, the incomplete studies performed on the sample, the almost-clear methodology etc. But those people aren’t scientists - all of the scientists who have discussed this have assumed from day one that it is likely an error, and perhaps toyed around in case their assumption is wrong.
To have reputational damage, they’d need to refuse to retract their work, refuse to elaborate further, claim they invented room temperature superconductors without sufficient proof, then attack anyone who questions them.
(To the other comment - yes, this being fraud would be an exception to the above. I am assuming it was done in good faith. If it turns out that it was intentionally designed to be misleading, then that changes things - and would be monumentally stupid of them, because publishing a method to a groundbreaking result on a preprint server is a sure-fire way of getting caught out)
If you click on the time stamp of your comment there is an 'edit' link there. (It should also be there in the thread.) It stays available for an hour or so and then it will disappear.
This is how science works. Sometimes you are right, sometimes you are wrong. Sometimes your 'wrongs' lead to the most amazing 'rights' (and not always by the same people) and sometimes they stay wrong. For example, Geoffrey Hinton was 'wrong' for years (though he didn't publish anything claiming he was right and had cracked something, but different field, but lots of people had already given up and he persisted) and look at him now.
Reputation matters, so don't commit fraud and don't try to trick others. That is the sort of thing you won't be recovering from. But being wrong is fine, even if you truly believe(d) that you are right. Note that this whole saga was not started on the timetable of the people that have the most at stake. I'm hoping they are right, I'm fearing they are wrong and if it turns out that they were wrong then I hope that they will not be dissuaded by that and that they and many others will continue the search. There are a lot of things that came out of materials science in the last two decades that we'd have never had if not for people searching for them. Not all of those searches will pan out, that's pretty much a given. Think of it as sifting for gold in a mountain of junk. For every piece of gold there are piles and piles of junk. And sometimes stuff that looks very much like gold, but ultimately isn't. That should not affect the reputation of the seekers. They are either going to try again, or maybe they'll give up. But what others think of them doesn't matter all that much.
I'm suspecting it's fraud. In a few months they'll come out and admit they fudged the numbers. I honestly hope not, room temperature superconductors solve a lot of problems, but we've been down this road before.
More likely, if it doesn’t pan out, they’ll come out and say “this is why we didn’t originally publish, because we weren’t confident in our work, but _somebody_ just had to go and disclose our (suspect) preliminary results. This behavior is also why we were happy that person had left the lab. Our work continues…”
If it turns out they’re wrong, then they will likely do a follow up paper that explains what their mistakes were. No biggy. It’s just a couple of preprints, after all, and it’s widely believed that it was pushed out without all of the authors’ consent in the first place. It won’t leave them with lasting reputational damage from their peers, though it may place slightly more scrutiny on their outputs at a later point.
They may get ridicule from the people who took their paper at face value without noting the informality of the format, the incomplete studies performed on the sample, the almost-clear methodology etc. But those people aren’t scientists - all of the scientists who have discussed this have assumed from day one that it is likely an error, and perhaps toyed around in case their assumption is wrong.
To have reputational damage, they’d need to refuse to retract their work, refuse to elaborate further, claim they invented room temperature superconductors without sufficient proof, then attack anyone who questions them.