The normal reaction of people, when someone tells them of their mistake, would be to thank the person who found the mistake and correct it with an apology if it may have harmed anyone. However, there can be a possible opposite reaction, i.e., they get angry for being found of their mistake and try to revenge or harm the person who found the mistake or try to hide it as long as possible hoping that no one else may notice it, especially when the mistake is hard to notice by the uneducated public.
Of course the second choice of the reaction is from the evil intent. You lose some or large portion of the advantages or prestige you may have had by admitting the mistake and correct it. This effect can perpetuate very long distance especially the mistake has been taught and accepted without contest by many generations. As a result, there is a form of a school of thought that has been formed around this faulty assumption. Now the finding of the mistake is about to have the earth quake effect to the whole scientific community that has been based on this faulty logic and they have to find the reasons why they can not correct the mistake.
You can tell lies to a few people and may be from time to time, but you can’t tell lies to all the people all the time. This is going to break up and it has to. The most damaging effect of not correcting the mistake is the loss of the resources, especially the money and the people’s valuable time or lives. For a simple example, if you do not correct the design mistake of a bridge, it will collapse and kill the people. If you do not correct the scientific mistake, it will make the public to lose billions of dollars in the project that is not going to produce the results let alone the innocent students career who have to fight the mistake to understand the workings of the universe.
I feel sorry for MOND physicists in this respect, should they have known the paper, and the people in the field (of general relativity) have acknowledged their mistake, they would have never ventured into the subject like they did. And Marcus Chown didn't have to write the article titled "Dark Matter is Dead" that looks so silly at this point. Dr. Steven Weinberg, when I pointed out on this subject in 1998, he replied, "publish it". One may say that it was their mistake for not fully performing the literature search. But they will notice there is more to it than that. There was active effort to prevent this paper being published since it was sent to Physical Review Letters, Science and Nature for publication many times to each journal. Who would like to spend four years to publish a paper, the subject of which is so obvious and clear although it may be viewed revolting to the staus quo.
It seems to me this is what is happening in the gravitational physics community today. They perpetuate the deception hoping that the public would never be able to find it out. They should remind themselves of the saying that you can tell lies to a few people and may be from time to time, but you can’t tell lies to all the people all the time and also the saying that "people's mind is God's mind". Neither of them seems to notice or act on certain evils of the world immediately but they do eventually.
I deeply thank the review board of the journal Physica Scripta from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for this paper being published. Otherwise, it would have never seen the light of the day.
Theory of Gravitation, Cosmology and a part of general relativity