3 ms·
This is a bit different. The neutrino error was when the only data-collection system was reporting surprising results, which can't really be invalidated without
by ajkjk 11y ago
This is a bit different. The neutrino error was when the only data-collection system was reporting surprising results, which can't really be invalidated without, well, getting another data-collection system and comparing.
These errors are surprises in the data itself: since the position of the object can be measured by multiple systems, it's considerably less likely that they would all make the same mistake. Of course it's possible that there's a 'single point of failure', like the data published back from the probe, that causes all the calculations to be off by the same amount.
On the other hand, the fact that these same probes/instruments can report everything else with extraordinary accuracy discounts that theory somewhat. It's still possible (perhaps the bug / cosmic-ray-induced bit flip only affects one particular data collection code path..) but it's less likely.
Altogether, my intuition for the neutrino result was "this is probably a broken experiment", but my intuition for this is "there's an effect that's not being accounted for". That effect could easily be forgetting to account for thermal radiation reflection or something else that's relatively uninteresting, but, I still think there's something going on.
- phkahler 11y agoThermal expansion?