Someone else has probably said this - isn't this a classic example that shows how silly the claims are about how the scientific community suppresses new ideas and anything that threatens "THE CONSENSUS"?
Difficult call. See, this result didn't go through peer review, it went onto arXiv, and then it got publicised, and since it's such a big deal for this many professional physicists working on a serious world-class project to be putting their name to a result like this, it was then almost impossible for the media /not/ to get hold of it and run with it, and within a couple of days it seemed to be on all the major news networks.
So the team essentially bypassed the usual peer-review quality-control system. In one respect, this probably did the journals a favour, because under mainstream journal guidelines (last time I looked), a journal might have been forced to reject the paper on the grounds that submitted pieces have to be free from identifiable error, and the fact that their result appears to disagree with SR (our standard reference theory for this sort of thing) would have to be counted as an apparent indication of error. And that'd put the journal in the embarrassing position of having to write back and tell the authors that they couldn't publish it. If this turned out to be a world-changer, that'd be like a record company being forced to turn down the Beatles because of company policy.
Some people in the physics community are actually quite unhappy that this paper has gotten onto the news and is being publicly discussed - they think that it should have been kept quiet until the assumed error had been identified. If things had been up to them as editors or reviewers, the paper would have been blocked until the result could be considered disproved, we wouldn't have had the media circus, and most of us here probably wouldn't know that the result had ever happened. To those guys, bypassing the scientific community's systems and going straight to the public is considered "unprofessional", whether it's done by this team or by the cold fusion guys. And apparently, half the experimental team were reluctant to have the paper published (by a journal) in its current form either, presumably they were worried about having their careers damaged by being associated with a high-profile "faulty" experiment.
I mean, I guess they're kinda pleased about the coverage they're getting /now/, but it might not have been obvious to them beforehand that they wouldn't get a professional roasting.
There's always been a big disincentive to publish "faulty" results, if you look back at Michelson-Morley, /now/ we tend to consider it as great experiment, but back then Michelson's collegues supposedly thought he was pathetic for not only failing in his experiment, but for being stupid enough to advertise the failure (which nobody else could then replicate for years). So if Michelson had bowed to peer pressure, maybe he wouldn't have published. And if he'd waited for third-party verification before publishing he might have had to wait a couple of decades.
The impression that I'm getting here is that science journalists and writers love the paper, students are excited, and some of the excitement has started to rub off on theorists. After all, those theorists are now being invited onto the telly to give their opinions for news programmes. It's exciting. But some of the journals might be getting a bit grumpy, because it makes them look irrelevant. Instead of giving the paper to a journal to get it peer-reviewed anonymously (so that it could sit and moulder for years as reviewer after reviewer submitted notes on "The result can't possibly be right, and here's another list of possible things that might have gone wrong") -- remember, it took years for James Terrell's controversial paper to get past peer review -- the group have succeeded PR-wise by effectively short-circuiting the "proper" scientific journal peer-review system and the usual quality-control "gatekeepers", going freelance, and crowd-sourcing their reviews.
As far as Science is concerned, its been a success -- feedback has been fast and dynamic, and it shows that students and writers and the general public love this stuff when it's freed from the constraints of researchers having to communicate with their public through the pages of Physical Review.
But as far as "The System" is concerned, it's an uncontrolled anomaly -- this is a rogue paper that's bypassed conventional peer review and quaility control and has "gone viral" in a way that means that none of the existing quality control portals can block it. People know that it's a big experiment, it's something to do with CERN, and the CERN brand is now big enough for them to consider the result "official", whether or not the paper's been rubberstamped by a journal editor and unnamed review staff.
If you're a journal editor, you must be thinking, crap, maybe these guys don't need us any more. Maybe some journals' systems just aren't fast enough for the modern news cycle. If people on all the major particle physics projects decide to follow that lead and essentially group-self-publish, then maybe the journals will just be left with the dregs.
So there's all sorts of potentially socially revolutionary aspects to this result that go way beyond the physics. Maybe in a year's time, people in this sort of situation will be getting their peer review via Facebook or Diaspora, or via aggregated news sites. It's a pivot-point for a lot of potential changes to our perception of the "proper" way to do science.
Eric
Plus, didn't they resynchronize the clocks many times when they got such an extraordinary result? Of course they would. And would they synchronize the clocks with the motion of the satellite in opposite directions every time? Maybe, but if so that seems a bit amateurish that they didn't take that into account. 3 years of investigation for what could be a measurement error and they wouldn't see this?
