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On February 23 2012 19:20 oGoZenob wrote:Show nested quote +On February 23 2012 17:34 Cinim wrote:On February 23 2012 10:35 ShangMing wrote:"Unfortunately"? "Unfortunately, everything we know about physics up to this point is still (experimentally) correct."? I don't even... If there is something faster than the speed of light, that means time travels is 100 % a possibility! No it's not. And as a phD physics student, I'm kinda relieved that everything I did and learn so far is not entirely false, and as to be restarted from scratch
As an engineering student, everything always changes, especially in my studies in software/hardware engineering as well as the sciences backing them. Just gotta roll with it bro  . Progress is good.
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On February 23 2012 20:45 nihlon wrote:
You learn from your mistakes, it actually works like that in practise... No research that tries to discover the unknown can avoid mistakes. Yes, this whole thing was blown out of proportion but if you assume every weird finding is wrong just because you don't believe in it, that's when you are doing bad research. They couldn't find an answer right away so they went public, which was probably their biggest mistake.
They did a very ambitious neutrino experiment. These are extremely error prone. The fact they got an error doesn't mean they are incompetenet. The fact they went public and made a huge media hype is a problem and a mistake.
They learned neutrinio experiments are error prone and that media hype can backfire. They should have known that already. Now as I predicted everyone loses and science as a whole loses credibility. Science does worse in the media than politics.
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On February 23 2012 20:55 NeMeSiS3 wrote:
So this actually is false? They don't travel faster?
Most likely this is false. There were sources of time errors found, they need to be checked carefully. One error makes the time shorter, the other longer. Knowing both allows you to correct the measured time. If that happens to be about 60 nanoseconds or a bit more, they would not travel faster than light.
A full check is planned for May 2012, presumably we get detailed rumors before then, but the official adjusted result will probably only come after May.
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Cern is trying to establish a dystopia! Quick Okabe, change the world line!
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On February 23 2012 20:16 Miyoshino wrote:
There is a difference between theories that work well but have a limited area of appliability and theories that shouldn't be working at all.
The result of something just being able to go straight out faster than light, no tricks used, strikes at the fountation of all at science. Even Newtonian science shouldn't work if it were true. This is one of the reasons why people never believed it.
If we found out it was really true today, then tomorrow we would live in a world were every computer on the world was broken and malfunctioning. The fact that they don't is again part of why no one really believed this claim. But if it were correct this would have to be the case. Even things like conservation of energy go out of the window. Science is build like an unside down pyramid. Things you think you know you keep using to get to the next level. If someone like f=ma is wrong, then every experiment done the last 100 years is wrong because they all assumed f=ma .
So in a sense yes it would mean our computers are consistently malfunctioning. How we don't notice it today has to be explained. Maybe we blamed then on bugs or something. Trying to tweak the electronics would only make the problem worse since we just accidentally hit a sweet spot that mysteriously works as if MQ were true.
So literally it would mean we don't know how to build computers anymore, with no obvious solution.
Same has to be true for other things like GPS. And this also means that the result of this experiment is unreliable anyway since it assumes MQ and relativity are true in the first place.
It would be different if neutrinos only went faster than the speed of light using a trick. Also, neutrinos could have been an exception.
Then yes, other parts of physics should be able to hold. But this is all just strange speculation.
The problem is that this experiment was a mistake. A measurement that was just extremely odd. This is different from discovering something new. Finding a new force or new particle are interesting things. Even if they demand we revise our old theories.
The reason why assuming this experiment's results were right gives so much problems and thus can't be the case is because it was a mistake in the first place. Therefore, it makes no sense to do so.
Also, there are plenty of gaps in our current models. The reason we have so little new discoveries is because it gets harder and harder to make them. You need bigger particle colliders and bigger space telescopes.
If you want to find out everything, you need one as big as the visible universe.
Disproving current theories is not how progress is made. Progress is made when you find new things. Like the period where we were finding new fundamental particles every week.
At this point we have been looking for the higgs boson for a long time and we can't seem to nail it.
And at the same time we have kind of a fictional science in string theory. This is actually not true science but a kind of physolophy since there is no experimental confirmation.
It is not like we have a dozen theories that all seem to be able to explain the universe equally well and now we have to figure out which ones are wrong.
We have only one we think is right but at crucial points we can't find confirmation.
You think you know a lot more than you actually do.
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On February 23 2012 20:16 Miyoshino wrote:
There is a difference between theories that work well but have a limited area of appliability and theories that shouldn't be working at all.
The result of something just being able to go straight out faster than light, no tricks used, strikes at the fountation of all at science. Even Newtonian science shouldn't work if it were true. This is one of the reasons why people never believed it.
If we found out it was really true today, then tomorrow we would live in a world were every computer on the world was broken and malfunctioning. The fact that they don't is again part of why no one really believed this claim. But if it were correct this would have to be the case. Even things like conservation of energy go out of the window. Science is build like an unside down pyramid. Things you think you know you keep using to get to the next level. If someone like f=ma is wrong, then every experiment done the last 100 years is wrong because they all assumed f=ma .
So in a sense yes it would mean our computers are consistently malfunctioning. How we don't notice it today has to be explained. Maybe we blamed then on bugs or something. Trying to tweak the electronics would only make the problem worse since we just accidentally hit a sweet spot that mysteriously works as if MQ were true.
So literally it would mean we don't know how to build computers anymore, with no obvious solution.
Same has to be true for other things like GPS. And this also means that the result of this experiment is unreliable anyway since it assumes MQ and relativity are true in the first place.
It would be different if neutrinos only went faster than the speed of light using a trick. Also, neutrinos could have been an exception.
Then yes, other parts of physics should be able to hold. But this is all just strange speculation.
The problem is that this experiment was a mistake. A measurement that was just extremely odd. This is different from discovering something new. Finding a new force or new particle are interesting things. Even if they demand we revise our old theories.
The reason why assuming this experiment's results were right gives so much problems and thus can't be the case is because it was a mistake in the first place. Therefore, it makes no sense to do so.
Also, there are plenty of gaps in our current models. The reason we have so little new discoveries is because it gets harder and harder to make them. You need bigger particle colliders and bigger space telescopes.
If you want to find out everything, you need one as big as the visible universe.
Disproving current theories is not how progress is made. Progress is made when you find new things. Like the period where we were finding new fundamental particles every week.
At this point we have been looking for the higgs boson for a long time and we can't seem to nail it.
And at the same time we have kind of a fictional science in string theory. This is actually not true science but a kind of physolophy since there is no experimental confirmation.
It is not like we have a dozen theories that all seem to be able to explain the universe equally well and now we have to figure out which ones are wrong.
We have only one we think is right but at crucial points we can't find confirmation.
I completely disagree. Disproving current theories is exactly how science is advanced and there are plenty of historical examples. Galileo's support of the Copernican model is the most quoted (probably together with Darwinian evolution through natural selection), but there are plenty more: Pasteur debunking spontaneous generation, Lavoisier proving that combustion was not due to Phlogiston and Einstein throwing out the lumiferous ether are all great moments in the history of science. Of course, they came up with alternative theories, but first they needed the evidence to support such things.
Such evidence accumulates slowly. Spontaneous generation was not Pasteur having a sudden eureka moment. There had been many instances of spontaneous generation not being consistent with the experimental findings (such as: why would spontaneous generation not work in salted/dried/frozen meat). Pasteur just put all of these findings together, adding the advantage of having a really good microscope (which Antonie van Leeuwenhoek already used to find yeast in alcohol fermentation) and concluded that fermentation was caused by microorganisms, not magic.
The finding of Neutrinos going faster than light would be exactly such a first piece of evidence showing that our current explanation is wrong (which, btw, we know already, it would just mean it's more wrong than we thought): we don't know what to do with it at the moment, but it is a piece of a puzzle and hopefully someone like Lavoisier, Pasteur or Einstein will come along and put the pieces together in a new, and interesting way of describing the observations. Yelling and waving your arms because it doesn't work right with what you believe just puts you at the willfully ignorant level of Galileo's churchly oppressors.
TLDR: new findings are exciting, especially if they turn science topsy turvy. However, new findings should also be scrutinized and these, unfortunately, were found wanting.
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All these scientists gathered after that incident and tried to figure out what had happened. When someone mentioned that there really could have been something faster than light everybody was laughing their ass off. That says all.
btw, I actually IS unfortunate that that neutron was not faster than light. If it would have been, It would actually be possible for humans to reach any point in the universe. But as of right now it does not seem like there is no way to get around the problem that the energy required for accelleration increases exponentially to the speed...
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On February 23 2012 20:16 Miyoshino wrote:
There is a difference between theories that work well but have a limited area of appliability and theories that shouldn't be working at all.
The result of something just being able to go straight out faster than light, no tricks used, strikes at the fountation of all at science. Even Newtonian science shouldn't work if it were true. This is one of the reasons why people never believed it.
If we found out it was really true today, then tomorrow we would live in a world were every computer on the world was broken and malfunctioning. The fact that they don't is again part of why no one really believed this claim. But if it were correct this would have to be the case. Even things like conservation of energy go out of the window. Science is build like an unside down pyramid. Things you think you know you keep using to get to the next level. If someone like f=ma is wrong, then every experiment done the last 100 years is wrong because they all assumed f=ma .
So in a sense yes it would mean our computers are consistently malfunctioning. How we don't notice it today has to be explained. Maybe we blamed then on bugs or something. Trying to tweak the electronics would only make the problem worse since we just accidentally hit a sweet spot that mysteriously works as if MQ were true.
So literally it would mean we don't know how to build computers anymore, with no obvious solution.
Same has to be true for other things like GPS. And this also means that the result of this experiment is unreliable anyway since it assumes MQ and relativity are true in the first place.
It would be different if neutrinos only went faster than the speed of light using a trick. Also, neutrinos could have been an exception.
Then yes, other parts of physics should be able to hold. But this is all just strange speculation.
The problem is that this experiment was a mistake. A measurement that was just extremely odd. This is different from discovering something new. Finding a new force or new particle are interesting things. Even if they demand we revise our old theories.
The reason why assuming this experiment's results were right gives so much problems and thus can't be the case is because it was a mistake in the first place. Therefore, it makes no sense to do so.
How does superluminal high energy neutrinos strike at the foundation of science?
How does classical mechanics change by superluminal high energy neutrinos?
What part of building a computer depends on high energy neutrinos not being superluminal?
How does superluminal neutrinos break energy conservation?
How does a GPS depend on high energy neutrinos not being superluminal?
Try to find sources for any of those. 
And what do you mean by "straight out go faster than light" as opposed to "using a trick" or "being an exception"? >_>
Superluminal high energy neutrinos would definitely force some (fundamental) modifications to the standard model, but it would not change the fact that
- classical mechanics describes all experiments done at non-relativistic, non-QM scales.
- QM describes all experiments at non-relativistic scales.
- The standard model describes every (non-gravity) experiment to date, some with incredible accuracy, and with very few exceptions.
No matter how a high-energy superluminal neutrino would change the standard model, it would have to change it to something that acts damn similar to the standard model in almost all cases.
The reason scientists (like me  ) were so sceptical to this measurement was that it didn't make sense. Intuition if you want. Let me make an example:
you throw a ball at 45 degree angle at a certain velocity, and measure how far it goes before it hits the ground. You do the classical mechanics calculation using the gravitational force at the surface of the earth g = 9.8 m/s^2 etc. Easy.
Then you go measure, and you see that it agrees very well with your model. However, you notice that as you increase the velocity, the ball doesn't really seem to go as far as you expect, and it falls short by more and more the higher the velocity. Eventually you realsie that you have to take air resistance into account, at which point you modify your model and now agree with experiments.
You will hit similar effects when you start going up in thinner air, which will gradually make the ball go further, when you start going out of earths gravitational field, which will gradually make it go further, etc.
Let's say that you build a new ball-launcher, launching it at an initial velocity of 5km/s, and the measurement shows that the ball goes 5 meters on average. The people building the launcher and doing the measurement say that they cannot find any error in their procedure, and calls for help from the community, asking for interpretations. The papers start writing about new revolutionary effects and that the model of ball-launching has to be rewritten.
What do you think at this point? While you are not at all alien to further modifications to your model, it has already been corrected three times after all, you do not expect a steadily growing distance with velocity to suddenly turn around completely to just barely leave the launcher when thrown at 5km/s. You would be pretty convinced that there is some experimental error. Not because the low-velocity model would suffer any changes (it wouldn't, those experiments are not changed by the new launcher), but because you intuitively find such a sudden change very unlikely.
So to tie up the ends, scientists would be fine with modifying the standard model, and there are plenty of suggestions around on how to do it (and no, I am not referring to string theory). But there was no approach that made much sense (not that people didn't try...) that would produce (almost) light-speed low-energy neutrinos, but superluminal high-energy neutrinos. Actually there were arguments that even if these superluminal neutrinos were real, we would have already noticed in other ways, for example through some kind of Cherenkov radiation (not sure about the details).
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Funny to see that people still defend this experiment even at this point only because they don't want to admit they were wrong.
It's hard to debate with layman anyway.
Faster than light doesn't mean we could have traveled further in the universe. It means very different things. It could mean a variable speed of light. It may mean an end to causality. It may mean space-time continously warps and distorts, with all the consequences that follow from that.
It would mean faster than light communication. But then there was to be something to communicate with.
People read too much SF and don't realize what the real math actually means.
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On February 23 2012 20:59 Miyoshino wrote:Show nested quote +On February 23 2012 20:45 nihlon wrote:
You learn from your mistakes, it actually works like that in practise... No research that tries to discover the unknown can avoid mistakes. Yes, this whole thing was blown out of proportion but if you assume every weird finding is wrong just because you don't believe in it, that's when you are doing bad research. They couldn't find an answer right away so they went public, which was probably their biggest mistake. They did a very ambitious neutrino experiment. These are extremely error prone. The fact they got an error doesn't mean they are incompetenet. The fact they went public and made a huge media hype is a problem and a mistake. They learned neutrinio experiments are error prone and that media hype can backfire. They should have known that already. Now as I predicted everyone loses and science as a whole loses credibility. Science does worse in the media than politics.
They did not go public and make a "huge media hype". They went public because they had results that did not support the theories, and they couldn't find out why, so they asked the rest of the scientific community for help in solving the problem. They never for one second assumed the results were correct and always treated it like it was just another error.
And still you have to keep your mind open to the fact that maybe, just maybe, something is wrong with our current understanding of the universe. How do you think Einstein made these theories in the first place? If you never question our theories then you'll find it difficult to make new progress. History is full of examples like these.
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You don't contact other phystists via the media. They deliberately did not ask anyone else to look at it and instead went to the media. They should have had a third party review their results and give their opinion.
In science there is huge competition. People are really afraid of others stealing their results or two teams working on the same thing and discovering the same thingat the same time. In the past sometimes it has been the team that went public first that got all the credit.
It seems quite clear that the scientists involved really believed their results, because it were their results, and they thought they had a huge scoop and they were dreaming of the nobel price so they went public and claimed they were first to discover it.
I guess the internet has their separate reality. This is really similar as with NASA on cold fusion.
Note the date:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ftl-neutrinos
Also, it is strange to suggest my mind should be more 'open' when that leads to false conclusions, like concluding this experimen was not a mistake. My judgment was right on yet you doubt it for exactly that reason.
And yes, if particles can travel faster than the speed of light, it does violate everything. If it were true causality or conservation of energy would have to be wrong. So yes, QM would be wrong. We aren't talking about a modification here. Without causality or conservation of energy, Newtonian mechanics cannot work in principle. Of course reality will still behave like if it does, but that's merely coincidence.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21328-fasterthanlight-neutrinos-dealt-another-blow.html
As a scientists you should feel in your gut feeling that faster than light particles would violate conservation of energy. That they violate causality is already a by definition given.
But you want sources and this article gives the actual argument.
And yes, there can be tricks. Like the neutrinos actually travelling through another dimension, taking a short cut and never actually going ftl. Or the speed of light for some reason beinh higher so the neutrinos travel below light speed but faster than our normal c. One can think of a lot of things.
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On February 23 2012 21:42 Cascade wrote:
Actually there were arguments that even if these superluminal neutrinos were real, we would have already noticed in other ways, for example through some kind of Cherenkov radiation (not sure about the details).
This was actually a nice argument. When something goes faster than the speed of sound in a medium, you get a sound shockwave (supersonic boom). When something goes faster than the speed of light in a medium, you get a different kind of shockwave, one made of specific light (photonic boom: Cherenkov radiation). The paper by Glashow and Cohen showed that (with the Standard Model as we know it), faster than light travel in vacuum would create a similar kind of shockwave, made up of electron and positron pairs. These should be much more easily detected than the neutrinos, but were not. The argument was then that since that radiation was not seen, either the experiment was wrong, or the part of the Standard Model that they derived this radiation from must also be wrong. But the part they derived it from was not nearly as poorly tested as the neutrino part (it holds for any particle going faster than light), so this was/is a strong theoretical argument in support of experimental errors in the experiment.
However, theoretical arguments of why an experiment must be wrong should always be treated with strong scepticism.
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On February 23 2012 21:56 Joe12 wrote:Show nested quote +On February 23 2012 20:59 Miyoshino wrote:On February 23 2012 20:45 nihlon wrote:
You learn from your mistakes, it actually works like that in practise... No research that tries to discover the unknown can avoid mistakes. Yes, this whole thing was blown out of proportion but if you assume every weird finding is wrong just because you don't believe in it, that's when you are doing bad research. They couldn't find an answer right away so they went public, which was probably their biggest mistake. They did a very ambitious neutrino experiment. These are extremely error prone. The fact they got an error doesn't mean they are incompetenet. The fact they went public and made a huge media hype is a problem and a mistake. They learned neutrinio experiments are error prone and that media hype can backfire. They should have known that already. Now as I predicted everyone loses and science as a whole loses credibility. Science does worse in the media than politics. They did not go public and make a "huge media hype". They went public because they had results that did not support the theories, and they couldn't find out why, so they asked the rest of the scientific community for help in solving the problem. They never for one second assumed the results were correct and always treated it like it was just another error. And still you have to keep your mind open to the fact that maybe, just maybe, something is wrong with our current understanding of the universe. How do you think Einstein made these theories in the first place? If you never question our theories then you'll find it difficult to make new progress. History is full of examples like these.
Einstein maybe is a poor example of keeping an open mind to controversial experimental results, seeing how he to the end of his life kept refusing quantum mechanics despite growing experimental evidence.  He was great at understanding and calculations for his time though!
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On February 23 2012 22:05 Miyoshino wrote:
You don't contact other phystists via the media. They deliberately did not ask anyone else to look at it and instead went to the media. They should have had a third party review their results and give their opinion.
They did, read the paper, look at the presentation given at CERN. Both are public. They asked the German and Swiss meteorology institutes to verify their GPS timing. Redoing an experiment that took 3 years is a valid question to ask, and is exactly what is happening. But you cannot just say: "We have something we do not believe, you cannot see it, but please do this 100 M$ experiment to verify it." You verify as best as you can yourself, you allow others to verify, then you go public. They did nothing wrong there.
On February 23 2012 22:05 Miyoshino wrote:
In science there is huge competition. People are really afraid of others stealing their results or two teams working on the same thing and discovering the same thingat the same time. In the past sometimes it has been the team that went public first that got all the credit.
It seems quite clear that the scientists involved really believed their results, because it were their results, and they thought they had a huge scoop and they were dreaming of the nobel price so they went public and claimed they were first to discover it.
You are very wrong in the second part, but I'm not so sure you are willing to believe that. Let me just state that they had internal debates about going public or not, had many verification tests, and in the paper they themselves describe it as the observed anomaly in the conclusion.
Believe what you will, you have very little evidence to support that statement. I am sure you can find one or two excited people in the group of 200 people. And if everyone of them gives 5 interviews, I am sure some will make hopeful and optimistic statements.
If you want to describe the group as a group, look at their public statements, they have not once claimed they believe this to be fully true. What they have said again and again is that they do not know what is causing the effect. That is why they were going public after more than 2 years.
I guess we can all have our own reality.
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They kept their resullts secret and didn't contact other neutrino experts. Contacting meteorlogical institutes doesn't even come near what they actually should have done.
Of course they didn't say they believed their results. That would have made them look incredibly foolish. But if they really believed that they would have given up on the experiment and discarded the results. They obviously thought they were onto something.
I have very little evidence? You yourself are evidence. You defended their experiment and now you even go as far as defend it after it turned out to be the embarrassment it was predicted to be. Why? Bias. Scientists are just as biased if not more biased than normal people.
Look at how big discoveries work. Look at who win Nobel prices and who don't. Talk to a top scientists about how they interact with competitors and about how to treat secrecy. Then it will become obvious.
Go explain to me that why everyone in the first week predicted this was going to be a huge embarrassment if there was no other way to do it? The fact that so many people said this should have told you that normally there are other ways to deal with this. Yes, even just giving up and ignoring the results would have been better.
I don't think they could have find a neutrino expert anywhere in the world that would not have told them to not go public. They all shook their heads when it happened.
Yet on all forums and internet communities where physics was discussed last year, the main thing we talked about was this experiment.
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On February 23 2012 19:40 Poffel wrote:Show nested quote +On February 23 2012 15:29 GGTeMpLaR wrote:
Well, technically, Einsteinian physics can never be proven wrong in the sense that it will be totally falsified, just like Newtonian physics is not really "falsified", and even if it could be, one experiment sure as well wouldn't be enough to do it.
Coming up with a better alternative theory that immediately has more theoretical predictive power and ends up having more empirical predictive power, that's the true gold medal. Sorry, but that statement doesn't mean anything. Truth really has little to nothing to do with an instrumentalist comparsion of theories according to their predictive power, Given enough epicycles, you could predict the cinematics of the nightsky according to Ptolemy's theory... that still doesn't mean that it's not totally falsified that the sun orbits the earth.
It's not. It's only falsified in relation to all of the theories we take for granted as true in relation to the experiments used to deduce that it doesn't. We didn't get rid of Ptolemic astronomy because it was falsified, we got rid of it because it had become degenerative.
You're right that truth has little to nothing to do with an instrumentalist comparison of theories to their predictive power, but it's a far better account of how science actually functions than Popper's naive falsificationism.
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On February 23 2012 10:35 ShangMing wrote:"Unfortunately"? "Unfortunately, everything we know about physics up to this point is still (experimentally) correct."? I don't even...
Do you have any idea how exciting it would be if something like this were true? It'd be an immense breakthrough that would probably usher in the biggest scientific golden age since the cold war era.
Why wouldn't you want that?
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On February 23 2012 21:09 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On February 23 2012 20:16 Miyoshino wrote:
There is a difference between theories that work well but have a limited area of appliability and theories that shouldn't be working at all.
The result of something just being able to go straight out faster than light, no tricks used, strikes at the fountation of all at science. Even Newtonian science shouldn't work if it were true. This is one of the reasons why people never believed it.
If we found out it was really true today, then tomorrow we would live in a world were every computer on the world was broken and malfunctioning. The fact that they don't is again part of why no one really believed this claim. But if it were correct this would have to be the case. Even things like conservation of energy go out of the window. Science is build like an unside down pyramid. Things you think you know you keep using to get to the next level. If someone like f=ma is wrong, then every experiment done the last 100 years is wrong because they all assumed f=ma .
So in a sense yes it would mean our computers are consistently malfunctioning. How we don't notice it today has to be explained. Maybe we blamed then on bugs or something. Trying to tweak the electronics would only make the problem worse since we just accidentally hit a sweet spot that mysteriously works as if MQ were true.
So literally it would mean we don't know how to build computers anymore, with no obvious solution.
Same has to be true for other things like GPS. And this also means that the result of this experiment is unreliable anyway since it assumes MQ and relativity are true in the first place.
It would be different if neutrinos only went faster than the speed of light using a trick. Also, neutrinos could have been an exception.
Then yes, other parts of physics should be able to hold. But this is all just strange speculation.
The problem is that this experiment was a mistake. A measurement that was just extremely odd. This is different from discovering something new. Finding a new force or new particle are interesting things. Even if they demand we revise our old theories.
The reason why assuming this experiment's results were right gives so much problems and thus can't be the case is because it was a mistake in the first place. Therefore, it makes no sense to do so.
Also, there are plenty of gaps in our current models. The reason we have so little new discoveries is because it gets harder and harder to make them. You need bigger particle colliders and bigger space telescopes.
If you want to find out everything, you need one as big as the visible universe.
Disproving current theories is not how progress is made. Progress is made when you find new things. Like the period where we were finding new fundamental particles every week.
At this point we have been looking for the higgs boson for a long time and we can't seem to nail it.
And at the same time we have kind of a fictional science in string theory. This is actually not true science but a kind of physolophy since there is no experimental confirmation.
It is not like we have a dozen theories that all seem to be able to explain the universe equally well and now we have to figure out which ones are wrong.
We have only one we think is right but at crucial points we can't find confirmation. I completely disagree. Disproving current theories is exactly how science is advanced and there are plenty of historical examples. Galileo's support of the Copernican model is the most quoted (probably together with Darwinian evolution through natural selection), but there are plenty more: Pasteur debunking spontaneous generation, Lavoisier proving that combustion was not due to Phlogiston and Einstein throwing out the lumiferous ether are all great moments in the history of science. Of course, they came up with alternative theories, but first they needed the evidence to support such things. Such evidence accumulates slowly. Spontaneous generation was not Pasteur having a sudden eureka moment. There had been many instances of spontaneous generation not being consistent with the experimental findings (such as: why would spontaneous generation not work in salted/dried/frozen meat). Pasteur just put all of these findings together, adding the advantage of having a really good microscope (which Antonie van Leeuwenhoek already used to find yeast in alcohol fermentation) and concluded that fermentation was caused by microorganisms, not magic. The finding of Neutrinos going faster than light would be exactly such a first piece of evidence showing that our current explanation is wrong (which, btw, we know already, it would just mean it's more wrong than we thought): we don't know what to do with it at the moment, but it is a piece of a puzzle and hopefully someone like Lavoisier, Pasteur or Einstein will come along and put the pieces together in a new, and interesting way of describing the observations. Yelling and waving your arms because it doesn't work right with what you believe just puts you at the willfully ignorant level of Galileo's churchly oppressors. TLDR: new findings are exciting, especially if they turn science topsy turvy. However, new findings should also be scrutinized and these, unfortunately, were found wanting.
Problem is, you can't disprove a theory. Pasteur didn't defeat spontaneous germ theory with empirical scientific evidence, he defeated him with social influences. In fact, if Pouchet hadn't simply dropped out of the competition (albeit, the commission members uniformly consisted of Pasteur's supporters), actual scientific method probably would have sided with Pouchet and spontaneous generation at the time because unknown to the scientific community at the time was that while boiling yeast infusion would kill all life, the boiling of hay (which would have been used in the commission experiments) does not kill specific spores which would allow life to persist through the failed "sterilization" process.
It was not the case that many instances of spontaneous generation had been shown falsified, neither theory had gained any ground because both had resorted to an ad-hoc manuever in the face of conflicting experimental results.
Point is, conventionalism, for better or worse, if a fundamental facet of science, and theories are never rejected because they've been falsified because an isolated theory can never be rejected by an experiment. If you want evidence of this and several other experiments objectively reported in recent history where a major progressive scientific discovery was made for all the wrong reasons (assuming the right reasons are the empirical scientific method), check out "The Golem: What You Should Know About Science" by Collins and Pinch.
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On February 23 2012 22:32 Miyoshino wrote:
They kept their resullts secret and didn't contact other neutrino experts. Contacting meteorlogical institutes doesn't even come near what they actually should have done.
Of course they didn't say they believed their results. That would have made them look incredibly foolish. But if they really believed that they would have given up on the experiment and discarded the results. They obviously thought they were onto something.
I have very little evidence? You yourself are evidence. You defended their experiment and now you even go as far as defend it after it turned out to be the embarrassment it was predicted to be. Why? Bias. Scientists are just as biased if not more biased than normal people.
Look at how big discoveries work. Look at who win Nobel prices and who don't. Talk to a top scientists about how they interact with competitors and about how to treat secrecy. Then it will become obvious.
Go explain to me that why everyone in the first week predicted this was going to be a huge embarrassment if there was no other way to do it? The fact that so many people said this should have told you that normally there are other ways to deal with this. Yes, even just giving up and ignoring the results would have been better.
I don't think they could have find a neutrino expert anywhere in the world that would not have told them to not go public. They all shook their heads when it happened.
Yet on all forums and internet communities where physics was discussed last year, the main thing we talked about was this experiment.
I personally like most of their actions. Not consulting other scientists in the field before going public is what caused the controversy and it was mainly because the main-stream media picked up on the story. If that had not happened, it would be completely fine.
The neutrino-story however put focus on a positive thing happening in science and because it was easy to communicate where the postman bites dog was buried it made a splash.
The splash it has made was a bit too optimistic and it therefore has meant that many laymen got too excited at either for or against the tachyon particle to see the science at work.
Now they have found some problems with the wiring of the least tested part of the experiment. My experience with wiring has primarily been as a noisemaker in experiments because of too bad shielding. How it can have a bias is beyond my knowledge...
Nothing is proven yet and the results from the other projects are still interesting. We just have to ignore the "I told you so" and "that is not impressive"-people.
The noise created by wiring is in itself a pretty interesting subject. Only if it was a miscommunication making the measured lenghts of wiring wrong or something similarly obvious, would it be embarrasing in my book!
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EPT
