Following my blog last Friday afternoon about the resignation of OPERA spokesperson Antonio Ereditato, it emerged later that evening that OPERA’s physics co-ordinator Dario Autiero, from the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Lyon, France, had also resigned. Nature reported that Autiero felt that tensions within the OPERA collaboration that had always existed were becoming impossible to resolve and that the media attention about superluminal neutrinos added fuel to the fire.
On Saturday, Ereditato broke his silence and wrote a long public statement about his resignation in a letter to the editor of Le Scienze, the Italian edition of Scientific American. In it, he says that words such as “‘errors’, ‘mistakes’ and ‘flop’ were bandied about regarding what in actual fact is standard scientific procedure in experimental work” and that “it is no accident that the word ‘error’ has a completely different meaning in scientific method than it does in common parlance”. He too points towards media attention, saying that “the message [of the results from the first press conference] was excessively sensationalized and portrayed with not always justified simplification” and that the “enormous media interest” put unexpected pressures on the entire collaboration. You can read his entire statement here.
To read more, click here.