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There has been enough criticism from scientific community at large and more importantly from within the OPERA collaboration that their spokespeople resigned fro

There has been enough criticism from scientific community at large and more importantly from within the OPERA collaboration that their spokespeople resigned from their position. Not much of that criticism coming from respectable scientists made it to mainstream media, though. I presume that is because they did not want to show a "holier than thou" attitude openly. But internally a lot of people thought "they must have done something wrong" and after they found the error "what were they thinking?". I think your impression is wrong, but very understandable unless you interacted with people offering criticism directly or semi-directly through one or two persons.

mayneack 14y ago
While I don't disagree with your characterization of the criticism, it was more complex than just "people within the scientific community were critical and people outside thought they did the right thing in opening up the data and methodology to criticism when they could not identify a problem in the initial troubleshooting." A large part of the community took a "wait and see" approach that was (obviously) skeptical of the results. Because of the hype associated with the event, it's not surprising that people would end up resigning whether or not they really did anything wrong. I can't say that I have enough of a background to know if they should have resigned or not, but I certainly wouldn't use the fact that they resigned as conclusive proof that whatever was done wrong was handled incorrectly as opposed to a reasonable error.