army1987 comments on I Defy the Data! - Less Wrong

39 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 11 August 2007 09:33PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 09 August 2013 10:45:55AM *  2 points [-]

Murray Gell-Mann:

Well, here's an example from my own experience. It's fairly dramatic, actually, to have this happen. Three or four of us, in 1957, put forward a partially complete theory of one of these forces, this weak force. And it was in disagreement with seven -- seven, count them, seven experiments. Experiments were all wrong.

And we published before knowing that, because we figured it was so beautiful, it's gotta be right! The experiments had to be wrong, and they were. Now our friend over there, Albert Einstein, used to pay very little attention when people said, "You know, there's a man with an experiment that seems to disagree with special relativity. DC Miller. What about that?" And he would say, "Aw, that'll go away." (Laughter)

(Also, the people in the superluminal neutrino fiasco at OPERA did all but defy their own data in the last paragraph of their original arXiv paper.)