[ISL]

See my reply to s800.

Before you jump ship to precision tests of gravity: graduate students' mean time to graduation in our group is >7-8 years. Our experiments take several years to set up, at least a year to execute, and at least a year to analyze.

When a new idea/theory comes up, we can often test it quickly (or rule it out with existing measurements), but our bread-and-butter work is a direct confrontation with hard experimental problems.

For scale, we can choose to be separately sensitive to both the gravitational signal and the tilt of the ground due to a pickup truck parked outside of our lab.

[gngeal]

Essentially, you're trying to do what the medical research isn't doing: to invalidate the existing papers. :-)

[ISL]

We're trying to figure out what's true.

Perhaps the most important function of precision experimental tests (all of them, not just ours), is to provide very tight constraints for new theories. Any successful new theory of physics must ultimately explain more observed phenomena than existing theory. If experiment is more sensitive than existing theories, it can provide a quick checksum for whether a new theory is correct.

Furthermore, if a precision measurement is able to show that existing theory is not quite correct, it can lead the way to better theories.

In the field of precision gravity, Newton's and Einstein's theories have been perhaps frustratingly correct. At present, nobody knows if/how the "Standard Model" and gravity might connect. They're mathematically incompatible.

With respect to any existing literature, most physicists' position might be approximately summarized as, "Trust, but verify."