High-visibility news reports slant CERN’s latest speed-of-neutrinos news
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0195
Something curious has come up in public accounts of the latest, highly provisional news about last fall’s tentative, still-under-study finding in Europe that neutrinos travel faster than light.
As noted — and fully quoted — in a Physics Today Online News Pick , CERN has issued a brief statement reporting that “two possible effects” have been identified “that could have an influence on [the] neutrino timing measurement.” Those possible influencing factors will “require further tests” scheduled for May, the statement says, and if confirmed, one of the two “would increase the size of the measured effect” while “the other would diminish it.”
CERN’s statement says or implies nothing conclusive. What’s curious is that Science magazine, National Public Radio (NPR) the Associated Press and all three East Coast national newspapers have quickly spun the news toward one of the two possibilities — in fact, toward falsification of last fall’s tentative finding.
Not long after CERN’s announcement, Science posted online a blurb with the unambiguous headline “ BREAKING NEWS: Error Undoes Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results .” The blurb opens this way:
It appears that the faster-than-light neutrino results, announced last September by the OPERA collaboration in Italy, was [sic] due to a mistake after all. A bad connection between a GPS unit and a computer may be to blame.
Science‘s blurb does note that new data are needed for confirmation. But the blurb gets cited in an NPR story containing the same slant toward falsification. Like Science, NPR does end by stipulating “the bottom line is more experiments are needed to discard the findings for sure.” But NPR’s story begins as follows:
Remember last year, when we reported that Italian scientists claimed to have broken the speed of light? Remember the mystical implications of that? The possibility that Einstein was wrong? That our very basic idea of physics was challenged? The idea that you could be shot before a bullet left a gun?
Then you also remember that our friend and astrophysicist Adam Frank warned that these results should be looked at with great suspicion.
It turns out the results from the experiment called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) could have been affected by a problem with the GPS system used to time the neutrinos.
The falsification slant also appears in the New York Times , which posted online a single-paragraph Associated Press blurb that was also published in the 23 February paper edition. The Times piece opens with the following: “Researchers have found a flaw in the technical setup of an experiment that startled the science world last year by appearing to show particles traveling faster than light. The problem may have affected measurements that clocked subatomic neutrino particles breaking what Einstein considered the ultimate speed barrier.” The Times does, however, make clear that two possible, opposing influencing factors still require investigating.
On 22 February, the Washington Post placed online a version of the same wire-service piece that appeared in the Times. The Post used a falsification-favoring headline: “European researchers find flaw in experiment that measured faster-than-light particles.” That’s a misreport in any case, since the possible flaw has not been confirmed. The Post does mention the two possible factors.
A slant toward falsification also appears in the brief, staff-written article that the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) posted online on the morning of 23 February: “ Bad cable may be to blame in flawed faster-than-light experiment .” It begins, “A malfunctioning cable may have been responsible for the claim that some particles may be able to travel faster than light speed, a potentially embarrassing outcome for physicists who had publicized the findings with great fanfare just a few months ago.”
Potentially embarrassing? The WSJ also mentions the two possible factors. But it doesn’t explain what more could have been done last fall by cautious experimenters who actually foresaw the fanfare—and who therefore sought to minimize the trumpeting of others by maximizing their own soberness in factual reporting such as that seen this week in CERN’s brief, clear but nevertheless misconstrued statement.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.