I work in this field (physics journals) as a developer. When this paper came out the authors stressed deeply that the result could be invalid. They said that it needs further exploration. The press blew it out of proportion, and the scientific community was understandably skeptical. It was further explored and found to be an erroneous result, but I am deeply saddened that these scientists have received such a backlash that they were forced to resign.
What would have happened if the perihelion precession of Mercury's orbit was ignored as an erroneous result? We would have lost key evidence for general relativity. What if Becquerel put his photographic plate and uranium rock in a drawer, saw anomalous results, and did not report on them on fear that perhaps somehow the plates were exposed in some other manner?
The point is that barring gross negligence or fraud, scientists should be encouraged to share results that perhaps are inexplicable or against current thinking. These are they types of results that have opened new fields of science in the past.
"... scientists should be encouraged to share results that perhaps are inexplicable or against current thinking"
Exactly. I very much appreciated the openness here, and was frankly more interested in how the issue was going to be resolved than in the FTL anomaly itself.
I fear that the OPERA fallout will constrain researchers to only spoonfeed us closely vetted, PR-sanitized, approved-by-committee results, with little visibility into the processes that produced them.
I was just going to say this... the biggest problem with this was the whole reddit/engadget/wired blowup, which led to more mainstream media blow up, and the whole thing avalanched out of control. It's very unfortunate. After a few years this will go the way of the SSC and leave the public conscious but it will still haunt physicists similarly.
The problem with the media blow up is that the public sees this as a public failure by the physicists, when it shouldn't have been. A problem was found in the experiment, and that's what was supposed to happen. It's a testament to the complexity of modern day experiments more than anything.
Along with everyone else, I agree that scientists shouldn't be punished for being wrong.
HOWEVER, it appears that the mistake brought to light existing frictions within the group, which is the driving force behind these resignations. From the article: 'Autiero ... told Nature that he did not resign because he made mistakes in the measurement. Rather, he and Ereditato ... "felt that tensions that had always existed within OPERA were becoming impossible to bridge."'
I hope that the lesson learned here isn't to never make mistakes, or worse still, that if you do make a mistake you need to cover it up.
There is also a third, even more frightening potential lesson here - if you arrive at a surprising result, assume you are incorrect and sweep it under the rug.
Hopefully that's not what people will take from this. Hopefully all they will take from it is to always report new science with a great deal of qualification and skepticism. It won't make headlines as well, but I think we've seen time and time again that the short and hyperactive media news cycle can't handle modern science.
I was listening to an interview on fresh air with baseball catcher Brad Ausmus today. He said something I thought was pretty insightful, and relevant to the science and people's reactions towards failure:
DAVIES: And when somebody could take a little berating what would you berate them about?
Mr. AUSMUS: Usually when I was berating someone it was because they were pitching what I would call scared. They were trying to avoid contact or they were afraid that the hitter was going to hit the ball. In sports in general you can't be afraid of failure, but in baseball there's so much failure you really can't be afraid of it. So the only time I would berate a pitcher or get on a pitcher would be when I felt like they were pitching scared on the mound and that they were trying to avoid contact because they were afraid of what was going to happen. So unless you were doing that like I said I general rule was to walk away with them feeling they could get out of that situation.
I hope popular and public reaction to scientific failure doesn't give way to "researching scared".
You would be surprised (or shocked, or perhaps just sadly resigned) to how often people "sweep things under the rug" in academic biology. Do your results conflict with some keystone experiment performed 10 years ago by famous people? Too bad for you, something must be wrong with your experiment.
Even better, my personal favorite is the "well, we think this is a real result...but we don't want to be the people to question the status quo. Ignore it".
I think a potential lesson, maybe a good one, is to try very hard to have all your collaborators on board with a very surprising result before you publish.
Difficult to say exactly what is going on here without more information, but it seems that the issue here is less about the mistake made, but more along the lines of how the mistake was made. In other words, the mistake happened in such a way to call into question these scientist's competence in the eyes of their colleagues. There is a subtle difference. It's one thing to get something wrong, it's another thing to get something wrong by what appears to be "a rookie mistake".
We cannot forget that science is still a human process, one that relies so much on trust.
My first reaction to this is that it is bad. Unlike other fields, you shouldn't be punished for making a mistake in Science. Science is driven off of mistakes and being wrong, and it's the opposite of everything else. I know the article says that there were other issues that led to this resignation, but just the fact that they've resigned has changed this scenario from being an exemplar of science to something muddy and mundane.
True, science is driven off of mistakes. However, it's driven off of novel mistakes.
In my own research, I've had experimental results that violated the second law of thermodynamics, showed nuclear fusion at room temperature, and indicated that the strength of the strong force was could be controlled by shaking it. If I published a paper every time I had results that disagreed with known science, I'd have more papers than Feynman.
Of course, the first one turned out to be a bad power supply and the second one a busted motor. There's no science being done there since these are exactly the results one would expect from experiments with those pieces of equipment. As for the third one, I don't know yet, but I already have a couple of good leads on where the problem might be. If I can't find anything, I'll publish the results, but there's a lot of things I need to test before that happens.
As a matter of personal opinion, the vote of no-confidence was probably overkill and the resignation not necessary. Science does need to publish the mistakes so that other scientists can learn from it. Heck, I learned some bits from LIGO's problems with RF a few years back. I think most of the frustration is just coming from the fact that no one's learned anything new from this mistake.
I know someone who has worked on similar experiments, and he was able to predict the fault that caused this problem upon first hearing about it, and a fair number of similar people were able to do the same. Someone who is too anxious to announce a major result without having checked common faults that could explain away the result first shouldn't be in charge of a major experiment.
From the article, the problem with the leaders was in how they handled the management of the team and the publicity of the announcement. You know there are problems when many of the collaborators asked to be left off of the paper; insufficient experimental checks were done (according to some team members); some of the team members heard about the results from the press release rather than from their colleagues; and so on.
The team also did not ask them to step down. The internal vote of 16-13 was insufficient to have them removed (2/3 majority required). So they really did step down on their own.
Well, that's kind of the point. It seems that enough of their coworkers believe that this wasn't even a glorious failure. It was a dumb failure (in their eyes).
Next time someone tells me "scientists are always eager to disprove existing theories", I'm going to call BS. That may be what science is about, but its practitioners are only human.
Weird time to just leave maybe he found something out that no one else knows. If he didn't and didn't share it in order to sell the idea or finding it would be a great excuse. If not walking away from the biggest scientific discussion in year is just crazy.
What would have happened if the perihelion precession of Mercury's orbit was ignored as an erroneous result? We would have lost key evidence for general relativity. What if Becquerel put his photographic plate and uranium rock in a drawer, saw anomalous results, and did not report on them on fear that perhaps somehow the plates were exposed in some other manner?
The point is that barring gross negligence or fraud, scientists should be encouraged to share results that perhaps are inexplicable or against current thinking. These are they types of results that have opened new fields of science in the past.