[If you are a layperson interested in the faster-than-light neutrino claim, and you haven’t yet looked at yesterday’s “open-space’’ post and the list of excellent questions laypeople have asked in the comments, you definitely should. And ask your own if you want. That post also gives an organized list of links to all my posts on the neutrino experiment so far.]
Now, here’s a problem: How should a particle physicist budget his or her time, when faced with the OPERA experiment, which has, say, a 1% chance of representing the most important discovery in decades, and a 99% chance of being wrong? After all, life goes on at normal speed — and in particular, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is continuing to gather important data at an accelerating rate.