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A Small Glimmer of Hope For Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos
sciencehabit writes "The CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva has confirmed Wednesday's report that a loose fiber-optic cable may be behind measurements that seemed to show neutrinos outpacing the speed of light. But the lab also says another glitch could have caused the experiment to underestimate the particles' speed. The other effect concerns an oscillator that gives its readings time stamps synchronized to GPS signals. Researchers think correcting for an error in this device would actually increase the anomaly in neutrino velocity, making the particles even speedier than the earlier measurements seemed to show."
Very much on point. Science results are at best only as good as the equipment and calibration that go into the measurements and as everybody except the so very smart scientists at CERN who decided to publish highly questionable results, it turns out now that there appear to have been faults in both.
What's more troublesome is the rush to publish these bad results and the resulting media show that can only make science look bad.
Bad science has that effect.
If you have a theory in which you are x% confident you shouldn't be publishing results that conflicts with that theory unless your confidence in your experimental apparatus, calibration and analysis are better than x%. Instead, you should say, "Gosh, it's a whole lot more likely that there's something wrong in my experiment than that the theory is wrong."
It would be damned hard to design an experiment that's sufficiently reliable to call relativity into question at this point. These guys should have their Ph.D.'s impounded until they grow some humility and common sense.
A rational government would take the money collected in the churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples and give it to the universities.