A few days ago a prominent physicist, Professor Frank Stacey of the University of Queensland, made a public statement on his retirement that he was burying a theory. He had believed he had measured a new gravitational constant for close objects. Over 12 years he and colleagues in Australia and overseas had tried to confirm a theory of a fifth fundamental force of nature to explain the observations. His claim had gained a great deal of publicity as, if true, it would have extended Newton’s law of gravity and Einstein’s theory of general relativity.