[gizmo686]

I'm reminded of the history of the measured charge of an electron. The first experiment to measure it was Millikan's oil drop experiment, which got a value smaller than current measurements. As other scientists made their own measurements (with different experiments), the measured value slowly increased. What is interesting in this is that we would not expect to see a gradual increase in the observed value. The explanation for this is that when people find a value that was "to high" they would look harder for sources of error that would increase the value, causing a systemic bias to under-report the charge.

Similarly, with the faster than light neutrino, we spent far more effort looking for mistakes that would make our answer bigger than it should have been, which introduces the same systematic bias.

The solution to this is to realize that science is a time consuming process, and it is okay to take a while to arrive at the right answer. But, if we are aware of these problems, we can get there faster.