Re: Makes particle physics sound like climate science
@Ledswinger
Well, you've managed to reduce a series of exacting experiments, conducted by teams of hard-working, dedicated scientists from around the globe to a ridiculous caricature that bears no resemblance to the methods or dedication of these people.
Congratulations.
The way it works is that this 'discovery' has been a long time coming. The first real hints of this phenomena came from what was known as the 'solar neutrino problem', where the observations of electron neutrinos coming from the sun did not match what was predicted by the Standard Model.
The next big part was from measuring muon neutrinos from cosmic rays and noting that the number matched from neutrinos coming from above (the sky) but there was a deficit in the count coming from below (through the Earth).
This is the important part because it underpins the way theories work and how scientists proceed from them. It is misunderstood - sometime deliberately, it seems - by people criticising 'science'. The assumption they make is that when an experiment disagrees with the theory or the models, that should mean the theory is now bunk but the 'science denier' sees that instead of invalidating the theory, scientists 'fudge' things to make it fit.
This is not only a gross misunderstanding of what happens but also a slight on the ethics and practices of the scientists themselves.
The point here is that the Standard Model is utterly astounding in its predictive capability and that predictive capability extends, literally, universally. The predictions of theory and the results of experiments have corresponded so exquisitely, so frequently and in so many instances that it is all but confirmed that it is, largely, on the right track. I don't mean perfect, of course, and I definitely don't mean complete.
Neutrino oscillation does not break the standard model, it just means that some of the assumption that have been made - specifically that Neturinos are massless - are wrong.
In a way, what you have described is indeed like the climate change situation in that some people simply misunderstand the way the models work and how scientists fit results into the theories and adjust the models accordingly.
It's not fudging and it's not disingenuous because that's the way it's supposed to work - you start with a hypothesis and you strengthen it. Eventually, you may bring large groupings of facts and observations together into a theory that ties them up and explains broad swathes of results and behaviours. The theory is then used, sometimes with other theories to build models that make predictions.
To the specific case here, it's worth noting that the Standard Model doesn't demand or even predict that neutrinos are massless (and therefore couldn't oscillate). The massless nature of neutrinos was fed into it from observations as all experiments seemed to point that way.
BUT, now that neutrinos have been found to oscillate, existing theories and equations and models can be used to make testable predictions that have been confirmed.
In the end, these experimental results work in the Standard Model's favour because it's the accuracy of it that allowed scientists to make the predictions that were shown to be false. Broadly, they took an assumption (that neutrinos are massless) and then combined that with the standard model to make predictions about what would be seen in experiments. That the experiments found differently has proven that the original assumption was wrong.
It should be noted that neutrino mass has not been detected or measured directly and is therefore inferred from the way they have now been shown to behave.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
