A guest blog post from Professor James Madsen about a talk he heard at the April American Physical Society meeting:
At the recent April Meeting of the American Physical Society in Atlanta, I heard three talks that examined different perspectives on the report of neutrinos that travel faster than light. This story received tremendous coverage from the popular media. Many colleagues recounted being questioned about neutrinos from a wide range of acquaintances. It certainly generated a lot of interest in a field that involves concepts that have few everyday analogs, and so is difficult to convey in a short article.
Was the faster-than-light saga an example of good science? The OPERA collaboration revealed a result that showed a measured speed for neutrinos that was faster, by a statistically significant amount, than the speed of light in empty space. They described how they did their measurements, what corrections they accounted for, and what estimates they used for uncertainties of the relevant factors. So, all of that seems consistent with what most would consider solid science.
How about the response to the OPERA result? According to a talk by Robert Garisto, editor of Physical Review Letters, the approximately one to two papers a day received at PRL could be divided into three broad categories.
• Those that critically looked at the experimental procedures, and made conjectures about possible flaws and the impact those flaws would have.
• Those that tried to develop a new theory to explain how neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light and still be consistent with other constraints established by supernova 1987a and by IceCube data among others.
• Those that presented proofs that neutrinos couldn’t travel faster than light.
In the end, PRL published only one theory paper which showed that neutrinos would quickly radiate energy and slow to sub-luminal speeds before they reached the detector. Of the submitted papers that examined experimental procedures, none suspected the poor cable connection which was ultimately identified as the main cause of the spurious result.
Rebecca Thompson and Michael Lucia each gave talks that looked at whether the OPERA result was good for science. Some were critical of the OPERA collaboration and felt that they had released their results prematurely. The result, they would claim, was to reinforce the popular notion that science is fickle and nothing is really understood (eggs are good for you, then bad, then ok for you, for example). Others said that by having the investigation openly reported the public gains a deeper appreciation of how science is done. In terms of generating interest, this story had about ten times as many posts (~1000) on Slashdot compared to other stories that are considered “high” impact (~100 responses).
James Riordon looked at the quality of science reporting based on multiple factors like aspects of the title, whether the result was reported as fact or as a puzzling measurement needing further exploration, etc. As one might expect, the quality of the reporting varied, sometimes even within the same news agency. One somewhat surprising result was that the science press did not always outperform the popular press in the reporting of this story.
What do you think? Was this an example of good science? Ultimately, several of the leaders of the OPERA collaboration resigned. Was that necessary? Do you think the public has a better understanding of how science works from this faster-than-light episode, or will this make the public more cynical about scientific claims? Finally, what was your impression of the reporting? Did you grasp the issues and understand that the results were tenuous until confirmed?
Post comments here or send to james.madsen@uwrf.edu.
