> but what if you actually do have a room-temperature superconductor, but the entire community is dead set against considering even the possibility?

That's not the case, though. If you say "I've got a room temperature semiconductor" (or a reactionless drive, or an antigravity machine, or whatever) and tell people how you did it, people will _absolutely_ try to reproduce that. Not just academic institutions, either; the US Navy has a bit of a history of trying to reproduce obvious nonsense, in particular.