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Comment by mandy12xx | Hacker News Reader

Since the two experiments have already conflicting results, this likely will/should be replicated, before we can believe this result. As an example, this experiment on neutrinos traveling faster than light was later proved wrong. https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2011.554.

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No one, including the original scientists IIUC, needed to be convinced the FTL-neutrino result was wrong. It was just a matter of what went wrong.

Tell that to the authors of the dozens of papers that showed up on the arxiv "explaining" the result.

Ok, fine, no one smart.

Indeed, IIRC some of the members of the collaboration even opted to have their name omitted from the author list.

I remember this well. At the time even the scientists involved didn’t think they’d broken the speed of light.

A lot of news publications still ran with the headline that physics had been broken though, because that generates more newspaper sales / ad revenue.

I'm increasingly moving towards first introspection, "am I feeling surprised or upset at this?" and if true, I skip reading it. It's a trick that can't always be applied of course, but in situations like this one, it's a pretty good one.

Also, all the "will surprise you", "happens next", etc are instant ctrl+w (close tab).

If it sounds too good to be true, it almost always is. (“Good” may be replaced with certain other adjectives such as “exciting” or “revolutionary”.)

I'm similar, but every now and then you overlook something really big.

If it's big enough, you'll become aware of it anyway.

The BBC article on this says there have been hints from other experiments that support these results, but they need deeper analysis:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-60993523

The result, published in the journal Science, could be related to hints from other experiments at Fermilab and the Large Hadron Collider at the Swiss-French border. These, as yet unconfirmed results, also suggest deviations from the Standard Model, possibly as a result of an as yet undiscovered fifth force of nature at play.

From the same article:

But the excitement in the physics community is tempered with a loud note of caution. Although the Fermilab result is the most accurate measurement of the mass of the W boson to date, it is at odds with two of the next most accurate measurements from two separate experiments which are in line with the Standard Model.

So... 2 experiments + theory Vs 1 'better' experiment.

I know which side I'd bet on.

IIRC, the culprit was latency in their GPU connections

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