Totally plausible indeed! One of the recent (past decade or so) major mistaken discoveries in particle physics was a cabling issue.

And from a different field, but closer to the quip: semiconductor lithography lenses' own weight causes stresses that cause birefringence in the optics that has to be explicitly corrected for. And that was true 20 years ago already.

(Recovering particle physicist here and thinking about this even much later gives me mild trauma. ;) )