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Comment by frumiousirc | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised Sabine did not bring her usual drama and controversy to this one and talk about the fact that there is, shall we say, "extreme tension" between the results from LSND/MiniBooNE and those of other experiments.

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11...

The 4th figure is the money shot.

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It is rare to see two-sigma results like this reported in physics. Or did I misunderstand?

There was a 2 sigma result, that has later been confirmed by a 4.9 sigma result from a new experiment with a new detector, giving now a combined 6 sigma confidence.

The paper I asked about reports a 2 σ result.

That is distinct from the other 4.7 σ and 3.8 σ results mentioned in TFA, which combined yield a 6. AFICS nobody has suggested this one may be combined with anything.

So, my question remains open: why did a 2 σ result merit publication?

Because outcomes of (in this case even large, complex, expensive) experiments should be published independent of outcome?

She really doesn't explain the basic research problems well, and I'm still mystified as to why she gets so much traction here.

She has a very empirical way of looking at things which is somewhat uncommon in theoretical physicists and appeals to interested outsiders who haven't been "inducted" into string theory or what have you. E.g. we might be able to do without dark energy, so why put so much emphasis on dark energy? We don't even see one superparticle at LHC, but grad students are still being pushed into stringy shit – why not cut our losses? Or on the flip side, here's a 6 sigma result!!! – why don't her peers seem to care?

The other side would be someone like Luboš Motl, who used to be quite popular too. His main point is that the mathematical completeness and coherence of string theory means it's the only game in town. Which, that might be a fair point, for all I know, but I'm a maths grad and I can only vaguely appreciate what he's going on about most of the time. It just needs a lot of study to get to grips with these theories well enough to judge them in the absence of confirmatory empirical evidence.

Unpaywalled https://escholarship.org/content/qt496002sb/qt496002sb.pdf

I don't have the background to interpret these figures, and based on a quick search for MiniBooNE mentions in the paper, the authors don't seem to say that MiniBooNE is an outlier relative to all the other experiments. Where does the paper talk about the tension?

EDIT: based on the comments below, it sounds like the tension is between appearance-based and disappearance-based experiments, and isn't necessarily about a single experiment being an outlier relative to others?

They do mention it, it's at the end of their conclusions:

"The results explicitly show the strong tension between null results from disappearance searches and appearance-based indications for the existence of light sterile neutrinos." p7

So yes they are saying there is tension between disappearance and appearance experiments, which is which?

"In this analysis, the measurement of muon (anti)neutrino disappearance by the MINOS experiment is combined with electron antineutrino disappearance measurements from the Daya Bay and Bugey-3 [16] experiments using the signal confi- dence level (CLs) method [17, 18]. The combined results are analyzed in light of the muon (anti)neutrino to electron (anti)neutrino appearance indications from the LSND [8] and MiniBooNE [9] experiments." p3

So yes they are saying there is tension between MiniBooNE results and MINOS, Bugey-3. I've no insight into the results either but GP's characterization of this paper was accurate.

uh,they do say "Regions of parameter space to the right of the red contour are excluded." you can see for yourself where mosto of the miniBoone resylts lie. By the way, why not link the preprint? https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.01177

The existence of a contradiction with other experiments was also something that was reported at the time:

> Despite the affirmation of LSND’s 20-year-old results, physicists have not concluded that there is a fourth neutrino species. The findings directly contradict those by a diverse set of experiments, including the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search, the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, and the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.1.2018061...

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