The Worst Kind of Science Hype – Starts With A Bang

"Did you hear the news? A game-changing story about the Universe has just come out! Something is vastly, spectacularly different from the way we thought, and it will revolutionize the way we think about the most basic, fundamental properties of our very existence.  Blah, blah, blah. Or, you know, not.  Extraordinary claims like this come out all the time: cosmological inflation is unnecessary, neutrinos can travel faster-than-light, our experiment has detected dark matter, the fundamental constants aren’t really constant, and so on. If you keep your ear to the ground (or listen to the more speculative sources), you’re bound to hear at least one or two of these a month. And they’re also almost always wrong. (And I hesitated there to put almost in that sentence.) Here’s why. Let’s say you’ve got a new piece of data, one that doesn’t line up with the presently best-accepted theory. Maybe you made an observation that didn’t line up with what that theory predicted. There’s a first-line-of-defense that this data must pass: is this observation robust?  In other words, when you perform this experiment or make this observation over and over again, will you get the same results? Will you see the same signal?"