Comment by mananaysiempre
2 years ago
One particular example that I remember from an introductory particle physics class is the History Plots section[1] of the biennial review of experimental data.
Knowing these quantities is important, but their particular values largely aren’t; nobody’s funding or career really depended on them being equal to one thing or another. Yet look at all the jumps, where the measurements after the initial very rough ones got stuck in the completely wrong place until the jump to the right value—when it happened—was of a completely implausible magnitude, like four, six, or ten sigma.
[1] https://pdg.lbl.gov/2023/reviews/rpp2022-rev-history-plots.p...
What's also good to see here is that the post '90 numbers usually don't even fall within the error bars of the pre '90 numbers. While uncertainty is great, it isn't the end all. I think a lot of people forget how difficult evaluation actually is. Usually we just look at one or two metrics and judge based on that, but such an evaluation is incredibly naive. Metrics and measures are only guides, they do not provide certainty nor targets.