Really? Has there been that much criticism from the science community? I though everyone with respectable opinions thought it was handled exactly like proper scientists should have handled it.
OPERA had unexpected results contradicting the status quo of our understanding of fundamental physics. They did everything they could to determine and correct and calibrate possible errors. They published the results and methodology in hopes that their peers could either help them understand what went wrong, or confirm it. An they did (the former).
I saw it as the science community at its finest. Sure, there was a lot of skepticism and disbelief in the accuracy/correctness, but that is part of the game. You don't take things at face value, and you don't ignore unexpected results.
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So, I don't have any objection to what you wrote, but, is my impression wrong?
There has been enough criticism from scientific community at large and more importantly from within the OPERA collaboration that their spokespeople resigned from their position.
Not much of that criticism coming from respectable scientists made it to mainstream media, though. I presume that is because they did not want to show a "holier than thou" attitude openly. But internally a lot of people thought "they must have done something wrong" and after they found the error "what were they thinking?".
I think your impression is wrong, but very understandable unless you interacted with people offering criticism directly or semi-directly through one or two persons.
While I don't disagree with your characterization of the criticism, it was more complex than just "people within the scientific community were critical and people outside thought they did the right thing in opening up the data and methodology to criticism when they could not identify a problem in the initial troubleshooting."
A large part of the community took a "wait and see" approach that was (obviously) skeptical of the results.
Because of the hype associated with the event, it's not surprising that people would end up resigning whether or not they really did anything wrong. I can't say that I have enough of a background to know if they should have resigned or not, but I certainly wouldn't use the fact that they resigned as conclusive proof that whatever was done wrong was handled incorrectly as opposed to a reasonable error.
> I though everyone with respectable opinions thought it was handled exactly like proper scientists should have handled it.
Not all criticism towards science comes from people with respectable opinions. In fact, most criticism towards the scientific community comes from people who have nothing but the most tenuous grasp on what science actually is and, more often than not, to defend a specific agenda.
In an ideal universe I think they did everything right. On the other hand, knowing what we know about the state of the popular press and the imagination of the internet it might have been worth being a little more careful to make it clearer that this is probably just an experimental error.
OPERA had unexpected results contradicting the status quo of our understanding of fundamental physics. They did everything they could to determine and correct and calibrate possible errors. They published the results and methodology in hopes that their peers could either help them understand what went wrong, or confirm it. An they did (the former).
I saw it as the science community at its finest. Sure, there was a lot of skepticism and disbelief in the accuracy/correctness, but that is part of the game. You don't take things at face value, and you don't ignore unexpected results.
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So, I don't have any objection to what you wrote, but, is my impression wrong?