I don't have knowledge about this phenomenon specifically, so you might be right that even an educated person would see hope, but I suspect it's more like whatshisface's two comments here which I think are very insightful:
We would expect new discoveries to be outside the range of what we've already tested, not randomly in the middle of it. For example, special relativity becomes significant at high speeds that nobody had ever studied before, not at some odd speed between a horse and a train.
But if you didn't know what has already been tested, you wouldn't know where "outside" is. The fact that the original device used a magnetron from a microwave oven suggests it was well within what we've already studied. Maybe the novel aspect is the very tiny effect which nobody measured accurately enough to notice before.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098795
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098873
We would expect new discoveries to be outside the range of what we've already tested, not randomly in the middle of it. For example, special relativity becomes significant at high speeds that nobody had ever studied before, not at some odd speed between a horse and a train.
But if you didn't know what has already been tested, you wouldn't know where "outside" is. The fact that the original device used a magnetron from a microwave oven suggests it was well within what we've already studied. Maybe the novel aspect is the very tiny effect which nobody measured accurately enough to notice before.