National newspapers show restraint in their first reports on additional speedy-neutrino news
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0229
Within hours of a scientific announcement in Europe and starting very late on 17 November, US national newspapers posted articles online that reported, as Dennis Overbye put it in the New York Times, “Two months after scientists reported that they had clocked subatomic particles known as neutrinos going faster than the speed of light, to the astonishment and vocal disbelief of most of the world’s physicists, the same group of scientists ... said ... that it had performed a second experiment that confirmed its first results and eliminated one possible explanation for how the experiment could have gone wrong.”
The articles in the Times , the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post explained that based on further experimentation with an adjustment in the experimental procedure, scientists are ruling out one of the previously conjectured possible sources of systematic error.
Overbye explained that adjustment this way:
Among the problems with the original experiment, scientists said, was that the neutrinos were produced in bursts 10,000 billionths of a second long—much bigger than the discrepancy in arrival time.
Last month CERN retooled so that the neutrinos could be produced in shorter bursts, only 3 billionths of a second long, making it easier to match neutrinos at Gran Sasso with neutrinos at CERN, and the experiment was briefly repeated. The neutrinos still arrived early, about 62 billionths of a second early, in good agreement with the original result and negating the possibility, the Opera team said, that the duration of the neutrino pulse had anything to do with the results.
A scientific paper, “Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam,” appears online as a preprint submitted on 17 November to the Journal of High Energy Physics. All three newspapers not only captured, but emphasized, this key point quoted from the very end of the paper:
In conclusion, despite the large significance of the measurement reported here and the robustness of the analysis, the potentially great impact of the result motivates the continuation of our studies in order to investigate possible still unknown systematic effects that could explain the observed anomaly. We deliberately do not attempt any theoretical or phenomenological interpretation of the results.
But all of this measured, sober reporting doesn’t necessarily restrain headline writers from reaching for at least a little bit of hype. Here’s the headline from the Wall Street Journal: “Scientists rule out error in Einstein-busting experiment.”
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. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the media.” 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.