Friday, June 14, 2024

An Antarctic expedition

I would also like to strongly recommend a delightful article by a journalist (Sofia Moutinho) who joined a scientific expedition to Antarctica, described in the June issue of Eos.  As someone who does not routinely do field work, this piece was an intriguing glimpse at the intense tempo of operations, and extreme conditions, for such an expedition.

The debunking of superluminal neutrinos

The July issue of Significance includes an article in its "Bad Stats" series by Robert Matthews about the claim made in 2011 by experimental physicists in San Grasso, Italy, of detecting faster-than-light neutrinos from CERN.  This was the story of the OPERA experiment (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus).  Among the literature cited by Matthews is a very good write-up on the episode by Chad Orzel, in the MIT Ptess Reader.  This article originally appeared in a 2020 book, Pseudoscience, published by MIT Press.  Orzel's piece is probably the best non-technical summary and post-mortem of the incident that I've run across - a keeper.  DTLR recommends it!