Hacker News Reader

Comment by SiempreViernes | Hacker News Reader

cought 750 GeV cough... ahem. Let me sing you an OPERA about a how Andrei Linde was astonished by the biggest BICEP you've ever seen! It belonged to a LIBRA* that was faster than light and could fly trough walls!

* Couldn't get DAMA to work :(

View on HN

Sure, but there's a difference between the accuracy of speculative theory and experiment. Experiment is very reliable -- they never called the 750 GeV bump a discovery of anything, because it didn't meet the statistical standards. Even things that do meet the statistical standards are often not called discoveries, because the experimentalists think they are systematic errors at play, as we see with MiniBooNE and DAMA.

Speculative theory is not reliable, which is why all the papers on the 750 GeV bump were wrong. But it has never been reliable, because, well, it's speculative! For each new phenomenon there's probably only one right explanation, but far more than one paper. Being 99% wrong has been par for the course for almost a century.

I mean, if CMS just hadn't played up their 2.3 sigma excess we probably wouldn't have had the 750 bonanza* so don't pretend there is no blood on the experimental hands :p

OPERA is a bit of a special case, but BICEP just straight up declared discovery and wanted the Nobel, have you seen their video of when they tell Linde?

* Any time I can, I link to the conclusion: http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2016/06/game-of-thrones-750-...

> BICEP just straight up declared discovery and wanted the Nobel, have you seen their video of when they tell Linde?

That’s a bit exaggerated. You mean the champagne popping video? Well, it’s somewhat awkward in hind sight, but a bit of excitement was warranted at that time. I was at Stanford around that time, might even talked to Andrei right after, and don’t recall a festive atmosphere or anything.

I feel bad for his wife every time I see it now :(

She’s also a Stanford physicist. Great person.

I agree that BICEP was the worst debacle of this kind that’s occurred in recent memory. But also see how the safeguards worked: their results were properly questioned, the hype was over in months, and they did not get a Nobel.

The high profile debacles were pretty quickly caught, so I’d say the system is working.

There are two aspects: how many errors are published and how they long before they are caught? The BICEP debacle is an example of a claim that should have gotten caught before it was published, doing an important calibration step using a photo of preliminary data?!

Actually, the error was caught before publication. They sent it to ArXiv, the standard pre-publication space, so that other physicists could read and comment on it. It was there that the error was quickly caught.

Oh, I didn't know that. I though with all the announcements they did they had a paper ready to publish...

Well, it's all a little ambiguous. You can choose to pre-publish or not, and you can choose to announce whenever you want: before pre-publishing, after but before publishing, and at the moment of publication itself.

It's certainly true that they announced early, but it's also true that the community at large regarded it with appropriate skepticism, causing the whole thing to be self-corrected in months.

"Stanford Professor Andrei Linde celebrates physics breakthrough"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA

Reply on news.ycombinator.com