Neutrinos respecting cosmic speed limit or about the scietific claim

Come on, isn’t that yesterday’s news? Most people mildly interested in particle physics will have heard by now that the data indicating neutrinos had travelled faster than the speed of light late last year was the result of a faulty cable in the OPERA experiment. Einstein’s relativity theory still seems to hold and time travel once again is relegated to science fiction movies and novels.

What new could this event then bring us? A lot indeed, because Jim Al-Khalili and his fellow physicists on the panel are doing a brilliant job in explaining not so much the OPERA experiment or neutrino travel, but how the quality of scientific results can be assured and what the consequences of publishing data which has not been checked thoroughly enough are. Actually, in explaining the actual relativity theory they are maybe doing the least convincing job here.

“Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof and extraordinary proof needs extraordinary care.” This is how Jon Butterworth, professor of physics at UCL, puts it and consequently argues that is was a mistake to release the data before all eventualities had been checked.

Giles Barr from the department of physics at Oxford counters: in his opinion, the publication of the data combined with the request to independently check the OPERA results was the right thing to do, because only in hindsight can it be known what the cause of the results were.

The difficult question here seems to be ‘When shall we stop checking the validity of data which is important enough to merit a Nobel Price if true, and publish?’ Interestingly enough, the eminent effect of the OPERA publication was that labs all over the world re-prioritised and re-direct their research budgets to validate or invalidate the results obtained in Gran Sasso, Italy.

Monetary costs through this should not have been significant, claims Jon. However, research capacity was diverted from potentially more important issues, especially as only scientists at Gran Sasso could have found the faulty cable causing the anomalies in the data.

Again, Giles opposes: “Research has to be wasteful. You have to do things where you don’t know what is gonna happen.” And while, especially in difficult economic times the wider audience may not agree to this, a show of hands reveals that the overwhelming majority of the audience thinks making the results available to the wider public at time they were was the right think to do, even in hindsight.

The value of communicating science and uncovering some of the myths about how science works may well outweigh the hours lost on other projects.