[elfchief]

To be fair, they didn't actually think they'd discovered faster than light travel. They basically went "uhhhh, we double-checked everything and our numbers work out but we're pretty sure this isn't faster than light; here's our paper, can someone please point out wtf we screwed up?

[simcop2387]

And the fun part of that one is that all the math, data, etc. all lined up to say that. Their analysis of the data was correct, and it turned out to be an equipment issue. A single incorrectly installed fiber optic cable, and an out of spec clock. It wasn't even a bad cable, just not inserted completely correctly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano...

EDIT: A much better detailed analysis of the failure including pictures of the cable, https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...

[credit_guy]

This is a bit of revisionist history. The way the "discovery" was announced was slightly subdued, they called it an "anomaly", and added the caveats that it could be due to some errors, but they also stated that the "deviation of the neutrino velocity from c would be a striking result pointing to new physics in the neutrino sector". So pretty much, we are not 100% sure, but if this is correct, this is revolutionary.

That's not exactly the tone of someone who asks the larger community to assist with a debugging exercise.

And the recent announcement repeats the same pattern. "This could be due to some equipment malfunction, but if not, then this is big".