@Science_George@mastodon.world
2026-09-23 12:01 UTC
And, spoiler alert, that's exactly how things turned out! The 6.2σ confidence achieved by the OPERA researchers - one in excess of the 5σ standard required to officially claim a discovery - was legitimate, but ended up being only a measure of great precision, not of accuracy.
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Replies (1)
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@Science_George@mastodon.world 2026-09-23 12:01
This incident just highlighted that even a statistically significant observation in excess of 6σ doesn't necessarily require any new phenomenon to exist, just that any such observation would be extremely unlikely to be merely some statistical fluke, or known systematic error. 4/