The ugly truth of science: Is there something wrong with the Scientific Method

[Joseph S. Barrera III]

On 6/17/2013 10:10 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:
 >
 > THE TRUTH WEARS OFF Is there something wrong with the scientific method?
 > BY JONAH LEHRER
 > http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer

 From the article:

"A lot of scientific measurement is really hard," Simmons told me.

It's true. I wouldn't call this a problem with the scientific method. It 
may exacerbate problems (real problems) with how science is *done* and 
*reported*.

I was looking for particle physics examples as that's where I actually 
know something. There is an example at the end of the piece:

"the weak coupling ratio exhibited by decaying neutrons, which appears 
to have fallen by more than ten standard deviations between 1969 and 2001."

This is a bit unfair, though, as he's using the small standard 
deviations of modern measurement instead of the larger standard 
deviations of the 1969 measurements. There's more discussion at 
http://billnichols.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/does-the-truth-wear-off-in-physics/ 
-- it's worth reading the comments, in particular:

"I got a little lucky finding that particular page. It is true that the 
neutron lifetime measurement has gotten shorter, but measuring the 
neutron lifetime is HARD. You cannot contain them because they are 
uncharged, the lifetime is measured in minutes, and even a thermal 
neutron moves a typical speed of 2200 m/s. It’s not surprising that the 
early measurements were off. The problems are very different from the 
clinical effects in drug tests or what I measure now in software 
engineering."

and an important correction:

"You’ve got a misprint in that data. It was -1.20 +/- .02 and settled on 
-1.27 +/- .005. (That’s eying it from the graph.)"

(Important because this correction reports the correct standard deviations)

The graphs on 
http://pdg.lbl.gov/2010/reviews/rpp2010-rev-history-plots.pdf are very 
interesting as they show (in particle physics at least) that it's not 
always a "decline" effect -- sometimes it's an "increase" effect (e.g. 
the mass of the lambda). Which is what I, at least, would intuitively 
expect from a phenomenon grounded in initially more inaccurate measurements.

- Joe