4 ms·

I share your doubt, but on the other hand I wonder why? Could you tell how a breaking message of this magnitude should be decorated to make all doubts go away?

• mlyle 3y ago
  It might be broken in an unreviewed preprint like this. But there will likely be very many bogus preprints for each true extraordinary finding. Therefore most things showing up like this are untrue.
• dspillett 3y ago
  > Could you tell how a breaking message of this magnitude should be decorated to make all doubts go away? You'll never make all doubt go away on a new extraordinary discovery, mainly because most claims of an extraordinary discovery turn out to be mistakes (like the FTL neutrino thing a while ago that turned out to be a wiring fault that caused a minute timing error) or occasionally fabrications. A quiet publication of “this is what we've found, this is what we think it means, please try reproduce or tell us what you think we've misinterpreted” is the way it should go. Unfortunately too subtle a release would be at risk of being ignored, and on the other side you get the mad public press and massive recriminations when it turns out a mistake was made and the finding is not reproducible (like the cold fusion thing I remember from the late 80s).
  • doctorwho42 3y ago
    The cold fusion people were actively touting data that didn't align to known fusion reactions. Like there are a limited number of elements one can fuse, but for some reason their reaction (which is known) had the energy off by like 300-400 KeV. For example: a proton signal of 2.6 MeV instead of the known 3MeV signal.