Oh boy, is the Standard Model about to get a brother or sister, where exchange of particles is not the source for ‘action’?
Einstein’s relativity theory was just a correction factor of Newtonian physics. As scientists peered closer into atomic scale phenomena, observations no longer agreed with the current model at the time.
Things happen differently inside condensed matter then they do in plasmas or gases. The vast majority of hot nuclear physicists worked in plasma/gas. Their arrogance was to presume that the branching ratios they see in gas also apply to condensed matter.
Of course, they were afraid their funding for hot-fusion experiments was threatened... which it was. So it was a turf war. They pissed hundreds of $billions down a rathole and won the turf war, but as a society we got bupkis for the effort.