Initial reactions from the physics community were generally positive, with physicists who watched the initial presentation praising it as “very carefully done” and “a very serious job.” But the general sense of excitement was tempered with scientific skepticism. We are saying, tell us what we did wrong, redo the measurement if you can.” He also noted that “a result is never a discovery until other people confirm it.” Now it is up to the community to scrutinize it,” he said. “We made a measurement and we believe our measurement is sound. The technical article posted to the Arxiv preprint server at the time of the announcement referred only to an “anomaly” and explicitly disavowed “any theoretical or phenomenological interpretation of the results.” At the CERN seminar, collaboration coordinator Antonio Ereditato emphasized the preliminary nature of the result Collaboration coordinator Antonio Ereditato emphasized the preliminary nature of the result. The initial public claims of the OPERA collaboration were relatively restrained. “A result is never a discovery until other people confirm it.” Rumors circulated on social media before the seminar created a huge sensation surrounding the announcement, which was widely reported in international news media. Given the potential importance of the result, and their inability to find an error, the OPERA collaboration put together a preprint of a paper describing their experiment, and scheduled a seminar at CERN for September 23, 2011. Despite extensive checks of the data, they were unable to find an explanation of this anomaly everything they could readily test was consistent with a faster-than-light speed for the neutrinos in their particle beam. This would directly contradict Einstein’s theory of relativity, which forbids matter or information being transmitted at speeds greater than that of light.ĭetailed analysis of the data within the OPERA collaboration provided a very good measurement of this anomaly: (60.7 ± 6.9 ± 7.4) ns (the two quoted uncertainties are statistical and systematic, respectively), corresponding to a speed of 1.0000248 ± 0.0000028 ± 0.000030 times the speed of light. The OPERA data showed particles being detected some 60 nanoseconds sooner than would be expected if they were moving at the speed of light. The neutrino beam produced at CERN is pulsed on and off in a regular way, and neutrinos are detected in real time at Gran Sasso, enabling a measurement of how much time the particles take to travel the 730 kilometers between accelerator and detector. In 2011, while analyzing data from its first three years of operation, the OPERA team spotted an anomaly. Its goal is to study how the fundamental particles called neutrinos transform as they travel from an accelerator at CERN outside Geneva to a detector at Gran Sasso in Italy. The Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA) collaboration involves around 180 physicists from 28 institutions, mostly in Europe. It was also extensively documented at every step, making it an excellent demonstration of the trajectory of a high-profile scientific failure. The faster-than-light neutrino saga evolved very rapidly, with the whole issue completely resolved within nine months. A new and improved measurement a year later confirmed that neutrinos do, in fact, obey the conventional laws of physics. And a few months later, in March 2012, the results were traced to a bad fiber-optic connection in the timing system. The excitement meeting the initial announcement was quickly matched by skepticism from many parts of the physics community. This article is excerpted from the book “ Pseudoscience: The Conspiracy Against Science.”
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