Comment by Anon84 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Anon84 | Hacker News Reader

Let's hope they learned the "Faster than light neutrino" lesson...

EDIT: In reply to comments:

1. The speed of the neutrino had already been measure experimentally before. It was unlikely that a new experiment would produce different results.

2. Requests for help from the scientific community are not delivered via press releases. Specially in an area as relatively small as high energy physics where everyone knows everyone.

3. If you look at the slides used to announce the "result" http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?resId=0&material... nowhere does it mention that they are not sure of the results and are asking for help finding the error.

4. The actual article, that was directed at the scientific community, http://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897v2.pdf makes no mention of asking for help to understand where the problem is. It simply announces a new result and the checks that were made to "ensure" that it was correct (as is common in any other scientific publication announcing a new result).

5. Immediate reactions from several leading minds in high energy physics were against the validity of the result. Perhaps these people should have been contacted before if they weren't sure of the result?

6. Shortly after the announcement was made, dozens of papers popped up "explaining" the result from every possible angle and receiving varying degrees of media coverage, further giving the impression to the general public that scientists don't know what they are talking about.

Based on all of this, my conclusion can be just one. This was a publicity stunt that backfired. As a result, people lost their jobs and science was shamed in the public eyes. Nothing more than disservice to science in exchange for 15m of fame...

What lesson? They found an anomaly on an experiment, before researching they found no error so they said to the science community: "We found this, can you spot the error?"

The media overreacted to this, they started writing shocking headlines. Don't blame the CERN, blame the media.

Both ATLAS and CMS have legitimate, crazily cross-checked data and therefore they are releasing it. That's all. This is how science is done - all CERN is doing is updating the world on its of progress the search for the Higgs boson. Sure, sometimes mistakes are made. But you'd have to be an idiot to think that scientists pull these for publicity. Press is a pain in the ass and we try to stay away from them as much as possible.

I'm pretty sure the combination is done blind by an independent research group too.

What lesson? So far as I can tell, there was nothing particularly wrong with how they handled that (other than the media over-reaction).

There was no reason for a press conference. As a physicist, I see it as nothing more than a publicity stunt that was not only bad science but also bad for science as a whole.

There are a lot of differences between the "Faster than Light Neutrinos" (FTLN) and the "Higgs Bosons" (HB), so it's not correct to say that the physic community has to use same lesson learned in that case.

Expectations:

* FTLN: They were measuring another thing, and as a side product they get a strange unexpected result.

* HB: One of the main reasons to build the LHC was to find the HB.

Theoretical background:

* FTLN: There is no theory that explains the FTLN (or at least that theories are not in mainstream)

* HB: The HB are a part of the "Standard Model", there are many correct predictions of the standard model.

Experiments:

* FTLN: That was the fist experiment that showed FTLN. There are some experiments that indirectly show that the Neutrinos travel almost at light speed. (For example, the light and neutrinos from a supernova arrive here with a very little time difference.)

* HB: There experiments in the ATLAS, CMS and Tevatron show that there is happening something very strange at 120-130 GeV. There are a lot of experiments were the results are modified slightly with the existence of the HB. Those experiments give an indirect "proof" of the existence and an estimation of the mass of the HB.

Consensus

* FTLN: Almost everybody in the physics community believed that the FTLN experiment has same error (probably even the authors), but most would have been very happy to see that the experiment was true, because that means that there is a big new theory to create and explore. But physic is (in the long term) driven by experiments and so far there are no confirmations of the FTLN and the authors have apparently found where the error was.

* HB: Almost everybody in the physics community believed that the HB exists, the discussion is about which version is the correct (how many kinds of HB are there, the exact properties, or that there is some even more strange that the HB). But physic is (in the long term) driven by experiments and so far there is only some 3.5-sigma "evidence" (that is really a lot of evidence) and probably in lest than two years there will be one (or two) 5-sigma measurements that are needed to proclaim a discovery.

And what lesson would that be?

Don't call press conferences for results that you aren't sure about and likely wrong.

I strongly disagree. They never claimed they had a result, they had a measurement that they could not explain, which they made public. I think it was an example of how science should be done, being open instead of being afraid of being wrong in public.

fjh - thank you. That is exactly the spirit of science.

It would be interesting to see some counter arguments instead of down votes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com