
The Data That Threatened to Break Physics - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/55/trust/the-data-that-threatened-to-break-physics-rp
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hn_throwaway_99
This quote is so very true, and it drives me nuts:

> “Society likes black and white,” he answers. But answers in science are not
> always so cleanly resolved. “We have to be careful because if we give the
> impression that science never says yes or no, says always maybe, then people
> say, ‘Well, then I should not trust science.’ It is very delicate how to
> give this message.”

It reminded me of some of the polls before the 2016 US Presidential Election.
Nate Silver at the time gave Trump about a 30% chance of winning, and when
Trump won, there were lots of "Even Nate Silver got it wrong!" comments. Most
people really don't understand the difference between anything less than 50/50
and 0, and it becomes a real challenge to explain things when reality works in
probabilities at a fundamental level.

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maxxxxx
Same for 20% chance of rain. People are surprised when it actually rains.

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mehrdadn
I'm not sure that's the best example. Probability of precipitation (PoP) is
simply a misleading measure by itself. It has a threshold of >0.01 in for what
is considered "rain". So if there's only a 20% chance that you'll get a
minimum 0.01 in of rain, you'd naturally expect a low chance for it to be be
much higher, and hence would expect not to get wet that day. The problem here
is that a guaranteed 10 inches of rain over 20% of the area would still give
you a 20% "chance of rain", which would still result in a 20% PoP, which is
not what you would want for a useful measure of rain.

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beautifulfreak
Ereditato was worried about giving an interview, but I'd say the author
(Ransom Stephens) did a good job of conveying the truth of the story. I feel
nothing but sympathy for Ereditato. Imagine the pressure he faced, being in
charge of this experiment with results consistently showing faster-than-light
neutrinos, having to be the spokesman for such an enormous and expensive
project with such crazy results. The potential for embarrassment due to the no
confidence vote might have been exploited by a less decent writer, but
Eriditato seemed less concerned with his own reputation than the proper
telling of how science works. Many scientists hoped that something weird had
actually been discovered, some new physics, so it was a big letdown for them
when it was all traced to the timing mechanism, and those egos are probably
still smarting from hoping for the still-impossible. There must be a lot of
people who have an axe to grind, even now. It's good to be able to see into
the human side of science, to see how things can go wrong and how it can
affect people, especially those who are in charge of organizations. It must be
great to be in charge when everything goes smoothly, but otherwise, uh oh.

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grigjd3
I still find the effort at self-examination this team underwent to be heroic,
especially considering the public pressure. This, to me, represents the very
best science - work that goes to extreme lengths to find their source of
error.

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everdev
What they discovered after years of testing seems like the most obvious: a few
nanosecond delay was found in the timing devices. I understand that it was
difficult to time the timers, but that does seem like the first place to
start.

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m_mueller
from the text it seems like a cable was different between experiment and the
validation process. Thing is, they did a further (bunched) experiment two
months later, and there it was wrong again? I have a bit trouble believing
that chain of events. Seems more likely to me that someone wasn't careful when
checking it in between these experiments.

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tw1010
Whenever people say that there's new research that threatens to crumble the
foundations of mathematics (like Banach–Tarski) or physics, I try to remind
myself that this is mostly just academic. Don't get me wrong, it's important
work. But bridges and buildings won't collapse as a consequence of accepting
or denying the axiom of choice.

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jjoonathan
Time travel could collapse (or build) a great number of bridges and buildings.

Nuclear physics, a comparatively trivial academic accomplishment, did collapse
a great number of bridges and buildings, and stood a very real chance of
collapsing _all_ of the bridges and buildings. It still might.

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SCHiM
It will, it's now simply a numbers game. Let's not kid ourselves, one day a
two nuclear powers will escalate and then we'll get to see if our doomsday
predictions were correct ;)

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troismph
Nonzero mass particles traveling at the speed of light, the very fact itself
is astonishing enough.

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danbruc
Neutrinos are generally expected to travel a tiny bit slower than the speed of
light. Nobody really expects them to travel at the speed of light even if we
are currently unable to measure the tiny difference.

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analog31
I was a physics student in 1987, when neutrinos were captured from a far-away
supernova. I rushed into my professor's office and asked breathlessly: "Does
the timing of the observations give us a limit on the mass of the neutrino?"

He calmly replied: Sorry, kid. Somebody already submitted a paper on that.

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peter303
The neutrinos arrived 3 hours before the photons. Thats 1/500,000,000
difference.

Plenty of things could have slowed the photons.

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analog31
That raises an interesting thought: Does interstellar space have a non-unity
refractive index? If there's any kind of matter out there, then I suppose the
answer has to be yes. But I wonder if it's quantifiable.

