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by greglindahl 3453 days ago
It is not unusual for a physics experiment to produce a weird result, and it turns out to be experimental error.
2 comments

True, it's but this has been replicated. It may yet be an error, but it's not a one-off by now.
Yeah there is a very good chance that's still the case here. But would be cool if it's not experimental error.
That's my sentiments here also - weird outcome would be cool, but I expect that we'll find experimental error. However, there is also the possibility of something in the middle - meaning no laws of physics are broken but the experimental error is itself an interesting engineering discovery.
There is also the possibility that the experiment itself is correct and the laws of physics are correct, but we applied them wrong, leading to a wrong prediction or experiment analysis. Many many calculations take short-cuts or make approximations. Or we apply a theory wrongly. In all these cases, we learn something new. Hitting the prediction (of the standard model) is boring.
It would be cool. But I've done similar measurements and this bears all the hallmarks of bad experiments. There are plenty of other ways the experiment might have gone wrong than those mentioned in the article - one that leaps to mind is RF interference (if that doesn't sound plausible to you you've never worked with lab RF).