Science
Einstein Theory Upheld… So Did OPERA Jump the Gun?
Nature Magazine has published findings by ICARUS that refute the claims made by OPERA that neutrinos can in fact defy the known laws of physics and travel faster than the speed of light.
The announcement of the findings by OPERA were received with a phenomenal amount of skepticism from renowned and amateur physicists worldwide, who have built their knowledge of physics on the tenants of relativity. With disputing evidence revealed within weeks, the scrutiny of the OPERA press office will inevitably be questioned… but what would lead a respected scientific organisation to jump the gun so quickly?
The scientific process of hypothesis testing inevitably causes misreads and misinterpretations, but with new evidence from ICARUS suggesting that the OPERA results were prematurely released to the media, the issue of when to release has been questioned. Obviously, any organisation that proves Einstein wrong is going to get some attention, and in political landscape scientists operate in… attention translates to funding.
So was the release of OPERA’s findings premature or a carefully calculated publicity stunt to draw attention to their work? There is not doubt that OPERA has enlisted some of the finest scientific minds in Europe if not the world, but it is most probably not them who decided to issue the press release. The decision to release these results with minimal fact checking (and we say minimal because claiming Einstein was wrong would warrant a significant recounting of data) would have been a political one, much to the embarrassment of the scientific staff. It is likely that OPERA’s publicity department were trying to get their hands on some more tax dollars to fund their important research.
Still, the findings were of interest if only to show that the status quo is never safe from investigation. But for laymen reading tabloids, perhaps we can avoid having a go at Mr Einstein.
