It's Okay To Be Smart

Faster-than-light neutrino update: What's going on behind the scenes?

The FTL neutrino study was published first on arXiv, which is a unique repository of pre-peer review announcements. So how does that affect how this story has been playing out?

arXiv isn’t peer reviewed. At least, not ahead of time.

A lot of the time, when you read a newspaper article about a new study in one of those fields, the study hasn’t actually yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. It’s just been posted to arXiv, which sort of becomes a crowd-sourced peer review peer review of its own. Especially for headline-grabbing research making big, bold claims.

That’s the background you need to understand what’s going on right now with the study that claimed to find neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. That announcement was made in an arXiv paper. Putting those results on arXiv was as much a way of saying, “Woah, we just found something crazy, please tell us if you see something we’ve done wrong,” as it was a formal declaration of scientific discovery.

Since that paper was published in September, there have been more than 80 follow-up papers, also published on arXiv, offering criticism of the original research or proposing theoretical explanations of how that seemingly crazy finding could fit into physics as we know it. And all of this is happening before anybody has gone through the peer-review publishing process.

The original research team has been able to gather criticism, find new ideas for checking their work and respond to questions because of this unique open-publishing format. It’s not a substitute for the traditional peer-review process, but I think it allows for stronger and better-reviewed data to make it out of the traditional filters in the end. It’s like a crowd-sourced pre-filter.

Now the CERN folks will take that feedback and repeat some experiments to strengthen or reject their claims. And that work will either make it or not make it into a traditional journal. Time will tell.

I agree with the final conclusion at Boing Boing:

Science benefits when scientists have more than one way to share information with each other.