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I work in this field (physics journals) as a developer. When this paper came out the authors stressed deeply that the result could be invalid. They said that it

I work in this field (physics journals) as a developer. When this paper came out the authors stressed deeply that the result could be invalid. They said that it needs further exploration. The press blew it out of proportion, and the scientific community was understandably skeptical. It was further explored and found to be an erroneous result, but I am deeply saddened that these scientists have received such a backlash that they were forced to resign. What would have happened if the perihelion precession of Mercury's orbit was ignored as an erroneous result? We would have lost key evidence for general relativity. What if Becquerel put his photographic plate and uranium rock in a drawer, saw anomalous results, and did not report on them on fear that perhaps somehow the plates were exposed in some other manner? The point is that barring gross negligence or fraud, scientists should be encouraged to share results that perhaps are inexplicable or against current thinking. These are they types of results that have opened new fields of science in the past.

deleted 15y ago
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juiceandjuice 15y ago
I was just going to say this... the biggest problem with this was the whole reddit/engadget/wired blowup, which led to more mainstream media blow up, and the whole thing avalanched out of control. It's very unfortunate. After a few years this will go the way of the SSC and leave the public conscious but it will still haunt physicists similarly. The problem with the media blow up is that the public sees this as a public failure by the physicists, when it shouldn't have been. A problem was found in the experiment, and that's what was supposed to happen. It's a testament to the complexity of modern day experiments more than anything.
dandrews 15y ago
"... scientists should be encouraged to share results that perhaps are inexplicable or against current thinking" Exactly. I very much appreciated the openness here, and was frankly more interested in how the issue was going to be resolved than in the FTL anomaly itself. I fear that the OPERA fallout will constrain researchers to only spoonfeed us closely vetted, PR-sanitized, approved-by-committee results, with little visibility into the processes that produced them.

deleted 15y ago

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juiceandjuice 15y ago

I was just going to say this... the biggest problem with this was the whole reddit/engadget/wired blowup, which led to more mainstream media blow up, and the whole thing avalanched out of control. It's very unfortunate. After a few years this will go the way of the SSC and leave the public conscious but it will still haunt physicists similarly. The problem with the media blow up is that the public sees this as a public failure by the physicists, when it shouldn't have been. A problem was found in the experiment, and that's what was supposed to happen. It's a testament to the complexity of modern day experiments more than anything.

dandrews 15y ago

"... scientists should be encouraged to share results that perhaps are inexplicable or against current thinking" Exactly. I very much appreciated the openness here, and was frankly more interested in how the issue was going to be resolved than in the FTL anomaly itself. I fear that the OPERA fallout will constrain researchers to only spoonfeed us closely vetted, PR-sanitized, approved-by-committee results, with little visibility into the processes that produced them.