Real-Life Decision Making -- Solution
You get another four or five people to repeat your experiment.
Because your reputation is on the line, as well as the reputation of your
other team members in the project, you decide to get five more people to repeat
the analysis.
Again, you utilize a totally independent analysis method. "One person can
develop a computer code to analyze some data, and if another person uses the
same code and that code has a bug in it, that person will find the same unexpected
results because the bug is in the program," says Janis McKenna.
"That's why we try to do it independently, where the person writes
his own software code and analysis tool to see if he gets the same unexpected
results," she notes. "If he does, we feel obligated to publish it, because
we've cross-checked it 10 times and it really looks like it's not
a mistake."
You also have extensive discussions with the other teams who have been
working on the project for 15 years. You compare data with them, and find
it conflicts with their results.
You've taken a chance that a competitor would discover the particle
first, but you've also covered all bases in making sure that your results
are reliable and without question.
This is a real-life decision made by McKenna. "It's one
of those risky things where you think you have a new discovery and hang on
to it and cross-check it, but not too long to where one of your competitors
could actually scoop you on it."