Abstract

On 22 September 2011 the OPERA collaboration published a paper which communicated their results concerning the measurement of the neutrino velocity, which appeared to have exceeded the speed of light. If confirmed, this would imply a huge anomaly for the theory of relativity and physics in general. It took until July 2012 for the OPERA collaboration to figure out this was due to an internal error in the experimental set-up. It made spokesperson Antonio Ereditato and physics coordinator Dario Autiero eventually resign. In the meanwhile there was a lot of attention from both scientists as the media, however the OPERA collaboration is yet to be properly evaluated. This paper aims at evaluating the scientific practice of the OPERA collaboration by considering the following two questions. How did the OPERA collaboration address this apparent anomaly and have the OPERA scientists performed as professional scientists should or not?