Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. When it's mostly likely experimental error, why do you think anyone should "take it for an anomaly"?
It might be an error, in fact it almost certainly will be. But it is not yet certainly an error.
Stand back: science still in progress!
“Whatever Nature has in store for mankind, unpleasant as it may be, men must accept, for ignorance is never better than knowledge.” ― Enrico Fermi
Unfortunately, you have to look into it carefully to find out whether it's experimental error or something more interesting.
And, to return to Everhusk's first post: Experimental error can result in an "anomaly". The experiment is not returning the results we expect. That's an anomaly. An anomaly doesn't have to be new physics.
:P
Something that's 1% likely and something that's 75% likely require different amounts of evidence to get to 95%.
In response to you, "unlikely" is not the same as "may be".
Then why did they go to such extraordinary lengths to find the source of it? Why didn't they just shrug and work around it?
Keep in mind they initially had no knowledge of the theoretical prediction of CMB, which was fairly recent and controversial. They just had a weird observation and busted their butts trying to figure out what it was.
> It was a classic example of being the first measurement of a thing.
Yes, now we know that. At the time it was not clear that it was a phenomenon worth measuring at all. I mean, they thought it was pigeons. It looked like a dumb error at first.
> Excellent discovery, and easy and inexpensive to replicate.
The "emdrive" is also easy and cheap to replicate.
I'm not saying that the emdrive works, I'm saying that experimental results matter. They should not be dismissed just becaus me they seem to violate theory. Violating theory is why people experiment in the first place.
For the emdrive, the effect is so small that it's suggested that the next step is to launch a powerful satellite costing $100mm or more. Uh, really?
From your comment, you seem to be tangled up in results being "dismissed". That's not what's going on, when people make comments about extraordinary claims and extraordinary results. A tiny, hard to measure result is not an OH MY GOD THE THEORY IS WRONG result. It is likely an experimental error.
For the satellite, there is atmosphere drag, magnetic fields, outgassing, etc, all probably bigger effects than the claimed drive effect!
Earth bound labs have much greater control of variables, reproducability, possibility to measure related quantities, possibility to run variations on experiments.
The reasons to do the satellite are (1) PR (2) wanting to NOT disprove the effect.
So? What if there was such a theory? It could still be false or incomplete, like Newtonian physics.
A couple of times in this discussion, you've argued about the definitions of words, and your definitions have been... at least different from the way the words are normally used. It's kind of distracting from the actual discussion, without adding much.
These usages convey fairly subtles signals about one's understanding of, and confidence in, a physical phenomenon.
This is typically only learned by people who write papers and have advisors who can guide them.
A really nice example of this which is also immediately readable is Watson and Crick's 1953 DNA structure paper.
http://www.nature.com/nature/dna50/watsoncrick.pdf
It's a classic understated style, with a small amount of boastful brilliance. The passive tone is a bit dated, but you can clearly see little was known about how DNA worked, and they were very careful not to make any strong claims without qualifiers.
The actual mechanism as you'd know bears barely a passing resemblance to that, since you've got the whole DNA replication complex assembly orchestrating it. So yes "suggests a replication mechanism" - but it doesn't remotely work as the suggestion would imply.
The replication complex is just an enzyme, it only speeds up things that are thermodynamically favored (replication can occur spontanteously because the dsDNA is lower energy, but it's rare because forming the phosphodiester bond requires a high activation barrier).
What, in your usage, is the difference between "unlikely" and "may be"?
(By the way, I'm not arguing against "unlikely" wrt any of these things...)
When you're talking about an extraordinary claim, it's a good idea to use "unlikely" and not "may be". The moon "may be" has deposits of green cheese, we just haven't found them yet. It is unlikely that the moon has deposits of green cheese. It is likely that the EM Drive thrust measurement is measurement error.