5 ms·

cought 750 GeV cough... ahem. Let me sing you an OPERA about a how Andrei Linde was astonished by the biggest BICEP you've ever seen! It belonged to a LIBRA* th

cought 750 GeV cough... ahem. Let me sing you an OPERA about a how Andrei Linde was astonished by the biggest BICEP you've ever seen! It belonged to a LIBRA* that was faster than light and could fly trough walls! * Couldn't get DAMA to work :(

knzhou 7y ago
Sure, but there's a difference between the accuracy of speculative theory and experiment. Experiment is very reliable -- they never called the 750 GeV bump a discovery of anything, because it didn't meet the statistical standards. Even things that do meet the statistical standards are often not called discoveries, because the experimentalists think they are systematic errors at play, as we see with MiniBooNE and DAMA. Speculative theory is not reliable, which is why all the papers on the 750 GeV bump were wrong. But it has never been reliable, because, well, it's speculative! For each new phenomenon there's probably only one right explanation, but far more than one paper. Being 99% wrong has been par for the course for almost a century.
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  I mean, if CMS just hadn't played up their 2.3 sigma excess we probably wouldn't have had the 750 bonanza* so don't pretend there is no blood on the experimental hands :p OPERA is a bit of a special case, but BICEP just straight up declared discovery and wanted the Nobel, have you seen their video of when they tell Linde? * Any time I can, I link to the conclusion: http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2016/06/game-of-thrones-750-gev-edition.html http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2016/06/game-of-thrones-750-...
  - oefrha 7y ago
    > BICEP just straight up declared discovery and wanted the Nobel, have you seen their video of when they tell Linde? That’s a bit exaggerated. You mean the champagne popping video? Well, it’s somewhat awkward in hind sight, but a bit of excitement was warranted at that time. I was at Stanford around that time, might even talked to Andrei right after, and don’t recall a festive atmosphere or anything.
    - SiempreViernes 7y ago
      I feel bad for his wife every time I see it now :(
      - oefrha 7y ago
        She’s also a Stanford physicist. Great person.
  - knzhou 7y ago
    I agree that BICEP was the worst debacle of this kind that’s occurred in recent memory. But also see how the safeguards worked: their results were properly questioned, the hype was over in months, and they did not get a Nobel.
oefrha 7y ago
The high profile debacles were pretty quickly caught, so I’d say the system is working.
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  There are two aspects: how many errors are published and how they long before they are caught? The BICEP debacle is an example of a claim that should have gotten caught before it was published, doing an important calibration step using a photo of preliminary data?!
  - knzhou 7y ago
    Actually, the error was caught before publication. They sent it to ArXiv, the standard pre-publication space, so that other physicists could read and comment on it. It was there that the error was quickly caught.
    - SiempreViernes 7y ago
      Oh, I didn't know that. I though with all the announcements they did they had a paper ready to publish...
      - knzhou 7y ago
        Well, it's all a little ambiguous. You can choose to pre-publish or not, and you can choose to announce whenever you want: before pre-publishing, after but before publishing, and at the moment of publication itself. It's certainly true that they announced early, but it's also true that the community at large regarded it with appropriate skepticism, causing the whole thing to be self-corrected in months.
fungicide 7y ago
"Stanford Professor Andrei Linde celebrates physics breakthrough" https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA

knzhou 7y ago

Sure, but there's a difference between the accuracy of speculative theory and experiment. Experiment is very reliable -- they never called the 750 GeV bump a discovery of anything, because it didn't meet the statistical standards. Even things that do meet the statistical standards are often not called discoveries, because the experimentalists think they are systematic errors at play, as we see with MiniBooNE and DAMA. Speculative theory is not reliable, which is why all the papers on the 750 GeV bump were wrong. But it has never been reliable, because, well, it's speculative! For each new phenomenon there's probably only one right explanation, but far more than one paper. Being 99% wrong has been par for the course for almost a century.

SiempreViernes 7y ago
I mean, if CMS just hadn't played up their 2.3 sigma excess we probably wouldn't have had the 750 bonanza* so don't pretend there is no blood on the experimental hands :p OPERA is a bit of a special case, but BICEP just straight up declared discovery and wanted the Nobel, have you seen their video of when they tell Linde? * Any time I can, I link to the conclusion: http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2016/06/game-of-thrones-750-gev-edition.html http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2016/06/game-of-thrones-750-...
- oefrha 7y ago
  > BICEP just straight up declared discovery and wanted the Nobel, have you seen their video of when they tell Linde? That’s a bit exaggerated. You mean the champagne popping video? Well, it’s somewhat awkward in hind sight, but a bit of excitement was warranted at that time. I was at Stanford around that time, might even talked to Andrei right after, and don’t recall a festive atmosphere or anything.
  - SiempreViernes 7y ago
    I feel bad for his wife every time I see it now :(
    - oefrha 7y ago
      She’s also a Stanford physicist. Great person.
- knzhou 7y ago
  I agree that BICEP was the worst debacle of this kind that’s occurred in recent memory. But also see how the safeguards worked: their results were properly questioned, the hype was over in months, and they did not get a Nobel.

oefrha 7y ago

The high profile debacles were pretty quickly caught, so I’d say the system is working.

SiempreViernes 7y ago
There are two aspects: how many errors are published and how they long before they are caught? The BICEP debacle is an example of a claim that should have gotten caught before it was published, doing an important calibration step using a photo of preliminary data?!
- knzhou 7y ago
  Actually, the error was caught before publication. They sent it to ArXiv, the standard pre-publication space, so that other physicists could read and comment on it. It was there that the error was quickly caught.
  - SiempreViernes 7y ago
    Oh, I didn't know that. I though with all the announcements they did they had a paper ready to publish...
    - knzhou 7y ago
      Well, it's all a little ambiguous. You can choose to pre-publish or not, and you can choose to announce whenever you want: before pre-publishing, after but before publishing, and at the moment of publication itself. It's certainly true that they announced early, but it's also true that the community at large regarded it with appropriate skepticism, causing the whole thing to be self-corrected in months.

fungicide 7y ago

"Stanford Professor Andrei Linde celebrates physics breakthrough" https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA