extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence...
It is probably safe to say that almost everyone in the physics community is skeptical of the faster than light neutrino result from the OPERA collaboration. People have begun to carefully examine how the experiment was conducted and, if everything appears in order, new experiments - prepreably using somewhat different experimental approahes - will be required to see if the result can be verified before the skepticism disappears.
Science is self correcting and the process can be messy. To the non-scientist it often appears as science making mistakes and can even lead to the conclusion that science can't be trusted. That is incorrect. Science is all about giving you the probability that something is likely. Large claims, like those of evolution, have been verified so many times and in so many ways that the theory is an excellent approximation of how nature works. To a slightly lesser extent the same can be said about many other phenomena - including anthropomorphic global warming. Scientists can tell you how good the reults are and you can make use of that knowledge.
Understanding how good a theory is and the conditions where it breaks down is incredibly important. Much of our civilization has been constructed using Newtonian physics. Gravitational potential energy = mgh, gravitational force = Gm1m2/r2, kinetic energy = 1/2 mv2, and so on. It is a simple model and calculations with it are very easy. It turns out to be wrong - but for the world we mostly live in the errors are tiny and completely acceptable. If you move to the very small you need to invoke quantum mechanics - an extremely accurate representation of the microworld, but very inappropriate for our scale. If you are moving very fast you need special relativity to get the right answer, but we rarely need it the speeds we use.
It would be wonderful if the OPERA result was true. Just as relativity hasn't destroyed the usefulness of Newtonian physics, this probably wouldn't destroy the usefulness of special relativity as it would be a small effect as all other cases seen to date have verified relativity to a high level of accuracy. It would force a rethinking of what is fundamental and that is what physicists secretly want - an illumination of a piece of Nature that was heretofore uncharted. But Nature is the ultimate truth - the ultimate answer and you can't pin hopes on overturned applecarts. A huge dream that no one has achieved is a general theory that is applicable for all known physics - and one that happens to be very predicative and points the way towards new discoveries. But that remains elusive and perhaps is not possible. Nature may or may not work that way - we simply don't know.
The reason for noting this is a researcher from the University of Groningen has found a potentiallly fatal flaw in the OPERA experiment.1 It appears they may not have considered multiple frames for the GPS time synching. That is a pretty glaring mistake and the experiment needs to be studied in some depth to see if they missed it, but the size of the flaw is a good match for explaining the experimental result.
It is common for experiments to have flawed design and/or analysis. Your competitors will point that out.
A common tshirt at Caltech sums it up:
Science, it just works bitches
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1 the paper - if you have had special relativity this is a very easy to follow back of the envelope calculation. Perhaps someone was careless and no one carefully checked the initial assumptions.
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