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Comment by brtkdotse | Hacker News Reader

> the instrument deformed slowly under its own weight for the last decade and now we're 4 angstroms off

This was hilarious and plausible at the same time. Nice work!

Totally plausible indeed! One of the recent (past decade or so) major mistaken discoveries in particle physics was a cabling issue.

And from a different field, but closer to the quip: semiconductor lithography lenses' own weight causes stresses that cause birefringence in the optics that has to be explicitly corrected for. And that was true 20 years ago already.

(Recovering particle physicist here and thinking about this even much later gives me mild trauma. ;) )

> One of the recent (past decade or so) major mistaken discoveries in particle physics was a cabling issue.

Have more info on this or link about it?

I'm guessing the parent is referring to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano...

"EM Drive" also probably counts.

From what I’ve been hearing, EM drive is more of “didn’t do the maths” followed by shoestring-budget “might as well try it, we have some spare lab space” work getting squished in between the serious projects.

Yes, thank you, that's the one I was thinking about. Apologies for not naming/linking it in the first place.

Thanks

The Pioneer spacecraft speed anomaly turned out to be forgetting to account for the small amount of thrust from photons generated by the heat of the spacecraft (~1kph per decade).

I thought they were, but with an oversimplified model.

It's like the six-sigma result of CERN OPERA experiment showing neutrinos travaling slightly faster than speed of light - which was ultimately caused by a fiber cable between clocks not being fully tightened and thus causing a tiny delay and messing up the measurements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano...

Experiments can detect all sorts of things, including new unanticipated subtle experimental artifacts.

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