Most people learn about the world of science through media outlets such as newspapers, news broadcasters, and blog posts like this. Unless someone is in that particular field of science, there isn’t a need to have a deep understanding of the media article as it is just meant to entertain you and keep you engaged. After all mainstream media only really cares about how many views a post gets. This causes a problem; in order to appeal to a wider audience and grab more peoples attention, science articles are often exaggerated, over simplified and sometimes flat out wrong.
Mainstream media authors aren’t always science majors and that’s fine as long as they do their research, because if they don’t they are just propagating pseudoscience.
The setup of the experiment. Source: Wikipedia commons
An example of this is when scientists from the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, fired neutrinos (a sub atomic particle) through the earth to a detector in Gran Sasso. This normally would not be of any interest to the general public, but the results of the test were very abnormal. According to the data, the neutrinos traveled 0.002% faster than light. If this was true, it would mean Einsteins theory of relativity is wrong, and this would have huge implications in the world of physics. The scientists that did the experiment were understandably very skeptical of this result, but could not figure out what could have went wrong. They published their results in hopes that other physicists would spot their error, but then it leaked to the media and it went viral. Everyone was talking about it and people really believed that the laws of physics really were broken.
A fiber optic cable. Source: Wikipedia commons
Soon after it came to light that the reason why they observed neutrinos going faster than the speed of light was because of a loose fiber optic cable that ruined their results. Although, the damage was already done. Many media outlets continued spreading the story and few backtracked and admitted the mistake.
The true story that everything is as we expected just isn’t interesting enough to publish, so people are left believing this false science. If the media wants to talk about science, they better do their research, otherwise it’s best if they talk about something else.
