Re: neutrino mass

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@sfu.ca>]

I said:

> > It bothers me greatly to see this news media event. These guys aren't
> > announcing their result on the publication date; they're announcing
> > that they've submitted it to PRL!<

Bill Larson replied:

> Leigh, they are giving a talk at a conference, thus "publishing" their
> data.

Yes, but they are not disclosing their method adequately so that we
can understand it. It would not compromise their chances of getting
the paper accepted by PRL to deposit a preprint in the LANL archive.
It has been their practice in the past to do so, judging by the stuff
that's already there. John Learned (to pick a name not at random) has
done so as recently as a May 15* in a paper which cites another in
the archive which substantially makes the claim that is being touted
in the press releases**.

> I've seen claims that this discovery (if correct) "cooks" the Standard
> Model, or at least will force its modification, but my impression is that
> the Standard Model says nothing about neutrino masses and that
> they are set arbitrarily to zero just because that is the simplest
> assumption.
> But that any other (small) value would also be fine, so this result, albeit
> very interesting, will not produce an improvement of the Standard Model.
> Correct?

I don't know, but it sure is Sensational. Correct is usually
determined by peer review, at least tentatively. This is clearly a
discovery claim; someone here is aiming for a big prize. The rules
of the game seem to be unimportant, and I can't even answer my
students' questions about this because my qualified colleagues are
unable to form an informed opinion. The world press, on the other
hand, seems to have no difficulty in doing so.

I have a very different idea about how science *should* be done.
A "discovery" entails complete revelation; this event may be more
correctly described as a "proclamation".

Leigh

*  hep-ph/9805343

** hep-ex/9803006 concludes (my edition from the original):

 The first measurements of atmospheric neutrinos in the Super-Kamiokande
 experiment have confirmed the existence of a smaller atmospheric nu_mu/nu_e
 ratio than predicted. We obtained R = 0:61 +/- 0:03(stat.) +/- 0:05(sys)
 for events in the sub-GeV range. The Super-Kamiokande detector has much
 greater fiducial mass and sensitivity than prior experiments. Given the
 relative certainty in this result, statistical fluctuations can no longer
 explain the deviation of R from unity.