Big ideas in physics possess a romance and glamour that few other areas of science can match. Dark matter supposedly makes up most of the matter in the universe but remains unseen, its allure rooted in being simultaneously omnipresent and invisible.

Those qualities push it almost into the realm of the divine — an association already claimed by the Higgs boson, discovered in 2012. These monumental concepts catch the imagination and because they force us to think about our place in the grand scheme of things, garner acres of coverage. Not all touted discoveries live up to the hype, however: The finding that neutrinos could travel faster than light, which threatened to overturn a cornerstone of physics, was withdrawn; “gravitational echoes” of the Big Bang turned out to be noise caused by galactic dust.

Some scientists are now arguing that the bar for announcing a physics breakthrough should be set much higher. Jan Conrad, a professor of astroparticle physics at Stockholm university, contends in Nature this month that the growing practice of releasing early drafts of papers in open-access repositories, in order to flag up intriguing results for other academics to check, should be reconsidered. Statistical rigour should be the order of the day and physicists should not publish the extraordinary results of a single experiment before parallel experiments have confirmed or refuted suspicions.

Such suggestions may render science pristine — but they also risk making it seem sterile to outsiders, including the taxpayers who largely fund it. Science is a messy, passionate affair peopled by characters ready to risk everything in order to seal their reputations. It might be painful to see some results and reputations fall publicly by the wayside, but it is surely more honest to portray science as it really is: a continuous, convoluted process rather than a done deal.

Professor Antonio Ereditato has lived through the process. He used to run the Opera experiment, based in the underground Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy, which clocks the arrival of neutrinos generated by Cern in Geneva, 732km away. Neutrinos are virtually massless particles that can travel at the speed of light but no faster, a limit first articulated in 1905 by Albert Einstein in his special theory of relativity. Prof Ereditato calculated that the neutrinos arriving from Cern were defying Einstein by travelling faster than light. He checked and rechecked — and published in good faith in 2011. It made global headlines.

There was only one drawback: It was not true. Important projects often run parallel experiments looking for the same result but using different technology, for robustness — and Opera’s parallel, called Icarus, later showed the neutrinos sticking awkwardly to Einstein’s limit. Suspicion fell on a loose cable synchronising the clocks at Cern and Gran Sasso. Prof Ereditato later resigned.

Century-old theories

What if he had been more patient? “Einstein proved right yet again” is a hard sell as a headline. Yet, without this drama, many people would not know what a neutrino is, nor that scientists have subterranean lairs in which century-old theories are being tested to destruction. Contemporaneous reports of the neutrino saga reminded readers that science is a dynamic pursuit; an important message that one tidy conclusion would not have conveyed.

Scientists announced last year they had “heard” echoes of the Big Bang, in the form of gravitational waves. I wrote about this early finding from the Bicep 2 experiment; data from the Planck satellite later showed it to be a false alarm. Galactic dust had created a spurious signal, a possibility I mentioned fleetingly. To have ignored Bicep 2, when physicists could speak of little else, would have been an omission of duty. Why exclude non-scientists from the drama?

It takes courage for scientists to report outlandish results, as I learnt two years ago when I interviewed Prof Sir John Pendry. And yet that is how science moves on. The Imperial College academic is most famous for inventing an invisibility cloak (made from material that bends light around an object), but his greatest reputational gamble was to publish a mathematical description of the perfect lens. Such a lens has never been seen; he proved, amid much scepticism, that it was theoretically possible.

“When you see something anomalous, it may be as small as a speck of dust on this table but it’s a gift,” he told me. “Either it will improve your understanding or will lead to something new.” In other words, publish and be damned.

— Financial Times

Anjana Ahuja is a science commentator.