Wikipedia:Peer review/Faster-than-light neutrino anomaly/archive1

OPERA neutrino anomaly

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because of a concern expressed by a GA reviewer it was incomprehensible to the nonspecialist (in this case, the nonphysicist). Would like feedback on whether the vocabulary is too loaded with physics and math jargon.

Thanks, Ajoykt (talk) 19:31, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

Noleander comments

• Lead could be better: The lead is a bit hard to grasp, but the body (following the lead) is not excessively technical. Just a few tweaks to the lead should be able to remedy the over-technical issues.
• Once the Lead is fixed, I think the body of the article is not too technical. I think the body, as it stands today, is comparable to other articles on advanced scientific topics. Articles on advanced physics cannot be too simple, or else they could not describe the topic accurately.
• Key tasks: focus on making the lead simpler. Laypeople should be able to read the lead and get a good understanding of the essential facts of the article. Sections following the lead can be more detailed (but not too: this is still a general encyclopedia, not a scientific journal)
• Picture: Probably the best thing to do is supply a simple schematic time-vs-distance diagram (not to scale), that shows the neutrino flight vs light-in-a vacuum, and show graphically how the n. got there faster than light would.
• Lead: in the lead, define the special relativity corollary: "Nothing can travel faster than light"
• Lead: emphasize how the Sp. Rel limitation was considered to be an ironclad law for around 90 years, and no scientist has ever observed a particle exceed the sp of light until this experiment
• Lead: name the speed of light, 300 kps; and name the approx speed that the measured n's were travlling ( 300.00001 kps or whatever, I have not computed it)
• Lead: Clarify which collider was used in the experiment ... the new Large Hadron Collider has been in the popular news a lot the past year: was it involved? or an older CERN collider?
• 4 paragraphs: Don't forget that the lead can be up to 4 paragraphs, so make it bigger if need be.
• Merge: It looks like someone proposed a merger with the Opera Experiment article. On the face of it, it sure looks like they should be merged. That should probably be resolved before moving forward with another GA. Never mind, I see that was done here: Talk:OPERA_experiment#Merge_proposal.

End of Noleander comments.

Another reply to Ajoykt's question:

As someone with a scientific background who is curious about the topic without having in-depth knowledge of physics, I did not find the vocabulary "too loaded with physics and math jargon." Necessary technical terms are wiki-linked. It is unrealistic to expect an article like this not to make judicious use of carefully introduced technical vocabulary. On the other hand, I thought some of the writing could be made rather more reader-friendly on stylistic grounds. Here are just a few examples which caught my eye on a rapid read through (my italics):

• "The OPERA neutrino anomaly is the detection of apparently faster-than-light neutrinos by the OPERA experiment as publicly announced in September 2011." As this is the opening sentence of the lede, might it be gentler for the general reader to start with something like "...detection by the OPERA experiment of neutrinos that appear to travel faster than light, as announced..."?
• "OPERA collaboration scientist and spokesperson Antonio Ereditato explained..." To my ears, "OPERA collaboration scientist" sounds like bureaucratic jargon.
• "To topographically link the surface GPS location to the underground detector traffic had to be partially stopped on the access road to the lab." A comma after "detector" would certainly help.
• "In their replication of November, OPERA scientists repeated the measurement over the same baseline without any assumptions about the details of neutrino production during the spill, such as energy distribution or production rate, by using a new CERN beam[14] which provided proton pulses of 3 nanoseconds each with up to 524 nanosecond gaps." Maybe split in to two sentences: something like "...or production rate. To do this, they used a new..."
• "The early arrival time of 57.8 ns in accordance with the main analysis was estimated as follows:" Multiple issues of flow and clarity around here, perhaps partially linked to an unfortunate paragraph break.
• "Astronomer Royal Martin Rees and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss state neutrinos from the SN 1987A supernova explosion arrived almost at the same time as light, indicating no faster-than-light neutrino speed." Final clause needs expanding and contextualizing, imo.

In brief, I feel the prose still needs careful copy editing throughout. Hope this helps a bit.

(Note: I deliberately avoided reading Noleander's comments and other PRs before giving an opinion.)

--MistyMorn (talk) 12:27, 10 December 2011 (UTC)