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Scientist Who Oversaw OPERA's Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Study Resigns
New submitter Big Hairy Ian writes with this news from the BBC:
"The head of an experiment that appeared to show subatomic particles traveling faster than the speed of light has resigned from his post. Prof Antonio Ereditato oversaw results that appeared to challenge Einstein's theory that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. Reports said some members of his group, called OPERA, had wanted him to resign. Earlier in March, a repeat experiment found that the particles, known as neutrinos, did not exceed light speed."
Part of scientific endeavor is getting it wrong, and testing again to make sure. It seems like the mistakes that happened were minor, technical, and easy to miss. It would be a very different manner if the problems had been from operational carelessness or intentional fabrication, but I can't actually see any wrongdoing here.
First Post!
All OPERA did was saying, "Hey, we saw a result that made no sense. This is what we did. Can anyone verify that we did something wrong?" And so his peers want him ousted for doing science as it is intended?
They had an unusual result, ended up having to publish something after a leak, then found the error and published that as well. This is science as it should be done. Asking for this man's resignation is idiotic.
The release of the preliminary Opera results last September was made after the news had leaked from the experiment to a few scientists not belonging to the collaboration.
First sentence of the last paragraph. This means they tried to keep it a secret as long as possible.
Seems wrong to me. You shouldn't fire a scientist because they got something wrong. As long as he followed the procedure and acted in good faith I think the community should let him be. From what I can see he practiced due diligence. A quote from the guy:
We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't. When you don't find anything, then you say 'well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinize this.'
Seems to me like he wasn't doing anything wrong, or make outrageous claims. They did an experiment and got questionable results. They tried to find the reason for the strange results and couldn't. So they asked for peer review. Peer reviewers found the mistake. Progress marches on.
That seems a shame to me. I'm a science educator and one of the things students love science for is that it's OK to get it wrong. You're allowed to do all the planning, setting up, measurements, analysis and evaluation and get the wrong answer, provided that you're honest about what you did and leave a record such that other can repeat what you did to see if they get the same thing. The faster-than-light news story was fantastic for me to underline the strength of science for my students, not least because of the very careful things that were being said by the scientists (compared to the media hyperbole). I hope Prof. Ereditato hasn't been made to regret the very great open service he did for contemporary science.
Nick Hood
A few weeks ago I was moderated -1 flaimbait on Slashdot because I dared say that the scientists were irresponsible in going to press with this news. Everyone thought I was being a jerk because wow, isn't this a great demonstration of the way the scientific process is going to work and didn't we all learn about science in this fiasco.
Guess what, yes, maybe for non-scientists this is "how the scientific method works," but internally, among scientists, we are supposed to do many levels vetting before we go public like this with a result. The press loves any news story that claims Einstein was wrong, and so it's easy to get caught in the publicity and make a big deal of something that should be scrutinized thoroughly before being exposed.
This was not "the scientific method at work." The scientific method at work is that when you find something that contradicts a successful 100-year-old theory, you sit down a few years and think about it before going public with it. Otherwise it costs you your fucking reputation as a scientists, which can end your career.
I think we can all agree at this point that the "FTL Neutrino" claim was wrong - but scientists need the freedom to be wrong once in a while, even in a big way. Without it, they might be afraid to make the kind of leaps of insight that one needs to keep science advancing. It follows that this person shouldn't have lost their job just for being wrong. Now, if there's clear evidence that he was stealing money, that's something else.
Finding God in a Dog
The original paper had over a hundred co-authors listed, and I have only heard of 5 people in the entire project that asked to not have their name listed. If the director should resign over this, then why shouldn't the 100+ other people who were confident enough to put their name on the paper?
This is stupid. They did nothing wrong, there is no reason for anyone to resign.
That is my guess. Scientifically they behaved fine, but the PR in the mainstream press might have been a bit uncomfortable.
The members of the mainstream press who blew things out of proportion and dumbed down the story so much and failed to emphasize that the real scientists were saying "we must have made a mistake" should resign.
:-)
The real scientist who sees something odd and shows it to colleagues to help him/her figure out what went wrong should not be punished when it turns out to be due to some basic mistake. Something like "I have odd data but I can't figure out what I did wrong" was the start of many scientific discoveries.
Creating an environment where scientists are reluctant to share odd results and get help finding mistakes will impede the progress of science.
However creating an environment where sensationalist journalists, or scientifically illiterate journalists who write articles regarding advanced scientific topics, are reluctant to publish their writing might be a good thing. Of course I might have made a mistake in my logic and I hope my slashdot colleagues can help me see my error.
My understanding is that the recent experiment showed Neutrinos traveling at the exact same speed as light. That may not be faster, but wouldn't that still require an infinite amount of energy according to current models and therefore not be possible?
Perhaps what we believe to be the maximum constant really is the speed of light, but there is an unknown force of quality of the universe that can change and effect that constant. E=MC2 is the formula for perfect conditions that we know don't really exist in nature, the actually formulas for converting a specific piece of mass into energy also take into account things like velocity; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence
Is there a factor that we're missing? Something that is one value 99% of the time and only under certain conditions changes?
No because he still works at OPERA as a scientist. He now no longer has the extra duty of talking to the press, on account of failing in the (impossible?) task of making them report honestly and accurately on the OPERA results.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
The difference is that then the politicians lose their job, while this guy is still getting paid the same salary, holding the same professorship - and, frankly, can still travel to all the OPERA conferences. To be honest, given the publicity and the stress that come with heading the collaboration I wouldn't be entirely surprised if there wasn't some relief mixed in with the pain and irritation.
Neutrinos having mass AND traveling at the speed of light means there is something seriously wrong with relativity or quantum theory. There's every reason to think at this point that there is a result in the offing, and there's no point making scientists tiptoe around while they try to find the hole.
Sounds lie proper science to me. Why was he forced to step down? Are we now saying that only scientist whose experiments are successful can do experiments?
Not at all. In any large collaboration politics comes into play, and no doubt there was much soul-searching on the part of all involved. Five people quit the collaboration rather than put their names to this paper, which is very high. It took them less than a year to find their mistake. Many people must have counseled caution and been swayed by the collaboration's leadership.
This is not science working the way it is supposed to, but rather politics working the way it is supposed to. The head of the collaboration made a serious error in judgment and lost the confidence of enough people that it was best for him to resign.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
The members of the mainstream press who blew things out of proportion and dumbed down the story...
Sorry but this time the press are most certainly NOT to blame. OPERA was by no means "scientifically fine" and they did not present it as "odd data" they specifically made the claim that neutrinos were travelling faster than light and asked for help to verify this. Read the paper if you don't believe me - it is there in the abstract. They specifically claim than the anomalous timing was consistent with faster-than-light neutrinos. This is NOT the paper you write if you have some data which seem crazy and you are not sure whether they are correct.
Something like "I have odd data but I can't figure out what I did wrong" was the start of many scientific discoveries.
Correct. However this does not mean that the moment you have some odd data you rush to publish. First you talk it over with colleagues and see if they can find fault (and OPERA did this internally which is fine). After that you could publish a paper explaining every single timing correction systematic error you have considered in full gory detail and at the end say that your final measured time of flight "appears to be" inconsistent with relativity. Better yet, for data with massive implications like this, you could invite a pannel of external reviewers to go over the data and experiment to look for mistakes with an agreement that if it is confirmed by them that they will publish their findings after the first paper laying out the full gory details.
What you do NOT do is publish an initial short paper with most of the details left out in a rush which claims the data are due to faster-than-light neutrinos. The mistake OPERA made was not in publishing but in HOW they published.
... turning to church-based learning is the answer ...
FWIW some churches may be doing OK with respect to scientific education. The Catholic church has stated that scientific discovery is not in conflict with faith, this includes discoveries with respect to evolution. They do a bit of real cosmological science. One of their priests formulated the currently accepted origin of the universe, the big bang theory. Our western tradition of the scientific method originated with various medieval bishops. I believe various other churches have similar perspectives. Not all Christian churches are of the opinion that the universe snapped into existence, as we see it now, on a wednesday six thousand years ago. The later group just gets more TV time and create a misleading impression of Christianity.
Having a PhD in science does not make you good at the media: if anything, maybe the reverse. Working at a university I'm around a lot of highly intelligent, highly focussed people who are brilliant at their subject - and partly so because they don't give a damn about many other things. Some of them have an incredibly limited world view outside of the domain. It's almost understandable in some ways: they've got so good at their domain by spending all their time thinking about it and not spending any time keeping up on current affairs, worrying about how the local sports team is doing and so on.
Now you might argue that their university's PR time should have protected them, that's a different matter. My recollection is they came up with a controversial result, and like good scientists asked their peers to help them understand their results. I think this is the equivalent of "their friends" that you refer to - the peer community. It's how we do things in universities, we post messages or mail the global community in our domain (might only be a couple of hundred people) and ask their advice. Unfortunately the possibilities were so mind blowing that even the mainstream media saw a good story and ran with it. They didn't have a chance....