So it is important to balance the OPERA mini-fiasco with another hot-off-the-presses neutrino story that illustrates why, even though mistakes in individual scientific experiments are common, collective mistakes in science are rare. A discipline such as physics has intrinsic checks and balances that significantly reduce the probability of errors going unrecognized for long.
The eagerness with which scientists will say “Whoa, hold on a moment” is a major reason I find the conspiracy theories about science — e.g. how we’re suppressing alternatives to relativity and quantum mechanics (mainly, through my filter of being a physicist) — so funny.
But this article is about more than the process: there’s some neutrino physics in there as well.
String/M-theory and all quantum gravitations: horror. SUSY, dark matter, neutrino see-saw mechanism: horror. All theories of mass assuming isotropic vacuum toward fermion leptons and quarks (true for massless boson photons) fails. Hierarchies of symmetry breakings are manually added to fit the curve. Extrapolation then fails, requiring more parameters.
Polywater, N-rays, krebiozen, amygdalin, Podkletnov anti-gravity, cold fusion, the Pioneer anomaly, superluminal neutrinos… If science wants grant funding, it must lift its skirts like any streetwalker.
Euclid fails on the Earth. Equatorial segment, two intersecting lines of longitude, and a pole. Triangles’ three internal angles always sum to more than 180 degrees (540 degrees maximum). Physics will fail – without contradiction of any prior observation – when opposite shoes vacuum free fall along non-identical trajectories. Challenge spacetime geometry with test mass geometry. A pair of Bass Weejuns is insufficient
Crystallography supplies opposite shoes, atom by atom, as 11 pairs of enantiomorphic space groups. Three pairs are especially good. Two pairs grow to large single crystals: left- versus right-handed alpha-quartz or left- versus right-handed gamma-glycine. The test apparatus already exists. The worst it can do is succeed.
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/erotor1.jpg
A good idea need only be testable. It is believable afterward.
Demonstrated trace anisotropic vacuum toward mass plus Noether’s theorems give trace non-conservation of angular momentum. Milgrom acceleration in MOND is sourced, dark matter is uncreated. Matter-antimatter abundance and biological homochirality are intrinsic. Sweet.