
'Faster-Than-Light' Neutrino Team Leaders Resign - ColinWright
http://news.discovery.com/space/opera-leaders-resign-after-no-confidence-vote-120404.html
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specialp
I work in this field (physics journals) as a developer. When this paper came
out the authors stressed deeply that the result could be invalid. They said
that it needs further exploration. The press blew it out of proportion, and
the scientific community was understandably skeptical. It was further explored
and found to be an erroneous result, but I am deeply saddened that these
scientists have received such a backlash that they were forced to resign.

What would have happened if the perihelion precession of Mercury's orbit was
ignored as an erroneous result? We would have lost key evidence for general
relativity. What if Becquerel put his photographic plate and uranium rock in a
drawer, saw anomalous results, and did not report on them on fear that perhaps
somehow the plates were exposed in some other manner?

The point is that barring gross negligence or fraud, scientists should be
encouraged to share results that perhaps are inexplicable or against current
thinking. These are they types of results that have opened new fields of
science in the past.

~~~
dandrews
"... scientists should be encouraged to share results that perhaps are
inexplicable or against current thinking"

Exactly. I very much appreciated the openness here, and was frankly more
interested in how the issue was going to be resolved than in the FTL anomaly
itself.

I fear that the OPERA fallout will constrain researchers to only spoonfeed us
closely vetted, PR-sanitized, approved-by-committee results, with little
visibility into the processes that produced them.

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drcube
Along with everyone else, I agree that scientists shouldn't be punished for
being wrong.

HOWEVER, it appears that the mistake brought to light existing frictions
within the group, which is the driving force behind these resignations. From
the article: 'Autiero ... told Nature that he did not resign because he made
mistakes in the measurement. Rather, he and Ereditato ... "felt that tensions
that had always existed within OPERA were becoming impossible to bridge."'

~~~
aiscott
Thank you for noticing this. I'm beginning to think nobody else actually read
the article.

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eblume
I hope that the lesson learned here isn't to never make mistakes, or worse
still, that if you do make a mistake you need to cover it up.

There is also a third, even more frightening potential lesson here - if you
arrive at a surprising result, assume you are incorrect and sweep it under the
rug.

Hopefully that's not what people will take from this. Hopefully all they will
take from it is to always report new science with a great deal of
qualification and skepticism. It won't make headlines as well, but I think
we've seen time and time again that the short and hyperactive media news cycle
can't handle modern science.

~~~
juiceandjuice
I was listening to an interview on fresh air with baseball catcher Brad Ausmus
today. He said something I thought was pretty insightful, and relevant to the
science and people's reactions towards failure:

DAVIES: And when somebody could take a little berating what would you berate
them about?

Mr. AUSMUS: Usually when I was berating someone it was because they were
pitching what I would call scared. They were trying to avoid contact or they
were afraid that the hitter was going to hit the ball. In sports in general
you can't be afraid of failure, but in baseball there's so much failure you
really can't be afraid of it. So the only time I would berate a pitcher or get
on a pitcher would be when I felt like they were pitching scared on the mound
and that they were trying to avoid contact because they were afraid of what
was going to happen. So unless you were doing that like I said I general rule
was to walk away with them feeling they could get out of that situation.

I hope popular and public reaction to scientific failure doesn't give way to
"researching scared".

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icegreentea
Difficult to say exactly what is going on here without more information, but
it seems that the issue here is less about the mistake made, but more along
the lines of how the mistake was made. In other words, the mistake happened in
such a way to call into question these scientist's competence in the eyes of
their colleagues. There is a subtle difference. It's one thing to get
something wrong, it's another thing to get something wrong by what appears to
be "a rookie mistake".

We cannot forget that science is still a human process, one that relies so
much on trust.

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jmcqk6
My first reaction to this is that it is bad. Unlike other fields, you
shouldn't be punished for making a mistake in Science. Science is driven off
of mistakes and being wrong, and it's the opposite of everything else. I know
the article says that there were other issues that led to this resignation,
but just the fact that they've resigned has changed this scenario from being
an exemplar of science to something muddy and mundane.

~~~
rprospero
True, science is driven off of mistakes. However, it's driven off of _novel_
mistakes.

In my own research, I've had experimental results that violated the second law
of thermodynamics, showed nuclear fusion at room temperature, and indicated
that the strength of the strong force was could be controlled by shaking it.
If I published a paper every time I had results that disagreed with known
science, I'd have more papers than Feynman.

Of course, the first one turned out to be a bad power supply and the second
one a busted motor. There's no science being done there since these are
exactly the results one would expect from experiments with those pieces of
equipment. As for the third one, I don't know yet, but I already have a couple
of good leads on where the problem might be. If I can't find anything, I'll
publish the results, but there's a lot of things I need to test before that
happens.

As a matter of personal opinion, the vote of no-confidence was probably
overkill and the resignation not necessary. Science does need to publish the
mistakes so that other scientists can learn from it. Heck, I learned some bits
from LIGO's problems with RF a few years back. I think most of the frustration
is just coming from the fact that no one's learned anything new from this
mistake.

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fabricode
No one is being punished for being wrong.

From the article, the problem with the leaders was in how they handled the
management of the team and the publicity of the announcement. You know there
are problems when many of the collaborators asked to be left off of the paper;
insufficient experimental checks were done (according to some team members);
some of the team members heard about the results from the press release rather
than from their colleagues; and so on.

The team also did not ask them to step down. The internal vote of 16-13 was
insufficient to have them removed (2/3 majority required). So they really did
step down on their own.

And in the end, "science" worked.

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fluorescentLAMP
I understand the embarrassment, but this isn't how science is supposed to
work.

If we can't have glorious failures, we can't have glorious successes.

~~~
icegreentea
Well, that's kind of the point. It seems that enough of their coworkers
believe that this wasn't even a glorious failure. It was a dumb failure (in
their eyes).

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andrewflnr
Next time someone tells me "scientists are always eager to disprove existing
theories", I'm going to call BS. That may be what _science_ is about, but its
practitioners are only human.

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Radzell
Weird time to just leave maybe he found something out that no one else knows.
If he didn't and didn't share it in order to sell the idea or finding it would
be a great excuse. If not walking away from the biggest scientific discussion
in year is just crazy.

