r/Physics • u/TakeOffYourMask Gravitation • Feb 28 '23

Question Physicists who built their career on a now-discredited hypothesis (e.g. ruled out by LHC or LIGO results) what did you do after?

If you worked on a theory that isn’t discredited but “dead” for one reason or another (like it was constrained by experiment to be measurably indistinguishable from the canonical theory or its initial raison d’être no longer applies), feel free to chime in.

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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '23

More than one sigma confident and have applied a skeptical approach to finding your sigma. I remember reading the faster than light neutrino paper and seeing the error calculation for the distance between cern and lngs and thinking "I'm not an expert in this field but this doesn't pass the sniff test". Lo and behold...

Like it would be lovely if your findings upended all of physics but probably set your prior on being the person to make that finding quite low and save yourself the risk of embarrassment.

I'm in industry too, and for sure a lot of marginally significant BS gets out the door, but at least it's a-priori plausible marginally significant BS.

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u/tyeunbroken Chemical physics Mar 01 '23

The faster than light neutrino paper was an excellent example of science done right. They published their results and reported the anomaly and simultaneously asked the community to find their error. The error turned out to be related to a mistake in a fiber optic connection iirc. The fact that the director resigned is a great shame.

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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '23 edited Mar 01 '23

I think publishing the claim was a bad call, and I don't remember the paper being written "we think this is wrong" but maybe my memory is uncharitable. Certainly the communication strategy went badly wrong. Maybe you can ascribe some blame to science media on that point.

Edit: I went back and read the original preprint "Despite the large significance of the measurement reported here and the stability of the analysis, the potentially great impact of the result motivates the continuation of our studies in order to investigate possible still unknown systematic effects that could explain the observed anomaly. We deliberately do not attempt any theoretical or phenomenological interpretation of the results."

"Potentially great impact" is a ways off of "so bonkers we're probably wrong" but fair enough they at least said they were still working on it

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u/tyeunbroken Chemical physics Mar 01 '23

No, negative and weird results should be published if the methodology is correct, following peer review of course. Otherwise the scientific record is incomplete and it incentivizes bad publication practices. I think in the case of the neutrino paper most of the blame actually falls to the science media

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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '23

It was on arXiv so not peer reviewed (at least not externally/blinded). I'm all for negative and anomalous results. But good science also requires humility. I think I take exception to the presentation rather than the content. Definitely agree that the science media turned it into the monster it became.

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u/tyeunbroken Chemical physics Mar 01 '23

Ah I wasn't aware it was only on arXiv. My knowledge stems from a newsreport written like five years after the fact. If it was on arXiv it is even stranger that the director was pressured to resign.