Real-Life Decision Making -- Solution
You publish a report on your discovery.
You've run the test yourself twice, and you've also asked three highly qualified physicists to run the test independently. Since they got the same results, you feel confident that you've discovered a new particle at that level, and you feel obligated to publish the data. So, you do.
"Once an official declaration has been made by the group that they have seen such and such, then that paper usually goes out immediately to a simple registry where it can be accessed on the Internet by anyone, even before it goes out to be published in an official journal," says Douglas Beder.
"During the phase when it's out there for everybody in the world who understands it to read it, you have another period of communications where people debate the significance of it."
Everyone around the world is busy discussing your unexpected discovery. At first, the members of the project are bubbling with enthusiasm, but that enthusiasm quickly turns to skepticism.
The two teams who have been working on the project for 15 years are aggressively debating your findings and pointing out errors in your reasoning.
They're accusing you of going at the discovery from strictly a "spotlight" approach, as if your only goal was the fame this discovery would bring. They feel you handled it in a very rash manner instead of considering all angles before publicly announcing the discovery.
The pressure continues to mount, and your effectiveness on the project has diminished. As your colleagues begin to question every comment or decision you make, you realize that your opinions aren't holding much weight anymore.
Maybe you should have asked more people to try to independently reproduce the analysis.