It has been my long held belief that science media needs an additional corrective in the form of blogs, similar to the development we’ve seen in the political sphere. Now it seems the news that the BICEP results, that were heralded as Nobel price worthy, may be wrong, originated with this blog post.
Certainly big enough news to interrupt my blog hiatus.
Maybe sometimes some results are really too good to be true, and this may turn out to be this year’s version of the faster than light neutrinos.
As was to be expected there is now some push-back against these claims, and the authors stand by the paper.
It also illustrates that science is a bit like sausages, sometimes you don’t really want to know exactly what went into it. At least that how I felt when I learned that the source for this controversy is the way that data has been scrapped from a PDF copy. One could hardly make a better case for why we need a good Open Science infrastructure.
Irrespective my favorite physics blogger took on the results and puts them into context.
I read in the article that already 300 papers have been published on the subject. Wow, and there might even be no basis…
Pretty crazy, but then again similar to the CERN faster than light neutrinos that also spawned all sorts of theoretical papers trying to explain the (wrong) results.
Will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Aint it strange, that a few only mention the huge problem caused by the already verified yearly variation of the supposedly constant decay rates of radionuclides? How is it that it did not make it through to the mass media? Perhaps out of the clear inability of the Standard Model washing it out? So many publicity stands, so little time!
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2008/oct/02/the-mystery-of-the-varying-nuclear-decay
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/august/sun-082310.html