Physicists must get used to the limelight

The flap over faster-than-light neutrinos will be the first of many

THE affair of the superluminal neutrinos is taking casualties. Two leaders of the OPERA collaboration, which in September announced the detection of neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, stepped down last week. Both cited mounting tensions within the team after it became clear that the best explanation for OPERA's anomalous result is not novel physics, but experimental error.

That is what most bystanders had expected since the news first broke: physicist Jim Al-Khalili notoriously promised to eat his boxer shorts if the claim was confirmed. But the revelation in February that it might be the result of a malfunctioning clock and a leaky fibre-optic cable nonetheless exposed OPERA to scorn and prompted criticism of its leadership.

In a letter to Le Scienze (the Italian edition of Scientific American), Antonio Ereditato, OPERA's outgoing chairman, defended the approach that the collaboration had taken. But he added that "as a result of the enormous media interest, the OPERA collaboration found itself under anomalous and in some respects irregular pressure, thanks to a series of excessive simplifications of the standard analysis and review process regarding experimental results and their interpretation."

One can sympathise with Ereditato's position, but such a remarkable claim was always bound to attract a huge amount of both public and professional attention. Indeed, a major reason for announcing it at all was so that others might scrutinise it.

Perhaps the only way to have avoided the fuss would have been to keep the result under wraps for even longer than the three years it took to become public. Its flaws might then have been uncovered more discreetly. But word was leaking into the blogosphere; OPERA physics coordinator Dario Autiero, who also stood down, says concealment was untenable.

The personal cost to those at OPERA's helm has been high. But with public interest piqued - witness Higgs hysteria - and big physics becoming ever bigger, the days of carefully stage-managed announcements of rock-solid results are drawing to a close. More such flaps will follow.

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