On today's online version of the highest-diffusion newspaper in Italy, Il Corriere Della Sera (a bit too right-winged for me, but still an important source) stands a piece signed by none less than Carlo Rubbia, Physics Nobel prize in 1984 for the discovery of W and Z bosons. Despite his not so young age any more, Carlo is still extremely active in the field of high-energy physics, where he has moved his interest into neutrino physics. Just to explain what I mean with "active", I listened to his talk at NEUTEL11 just a couple of weeks ago, where he proposed a new neutrino experiment to be performed at CERN. Rubbia is also quite active in the field of energy sources, but it would take another post to discuss that.
Nowadays Rubbia belongs to the ICARUS collaboration, which put together a large detector to study a neutrino beam sent from CERN underground. And it is about that experiment that he writes in today's Corriere. However, even the most influential and esteemed scientists require some editing before they get published. And there's the rub: for in that sleep of thought what nightmarish concepts may come, when we've shuffled off our paper drafts... Here is what you can read half-way through Rubbia's paper (boldface is mine):
"Da qui l'estremo interesse ad esempio del fascio di neutrini
proveniente dal Cern di Ginevra che attraversando le Alpi e gli
Appennini a grande distanza sottoterra, risale in superficie grazie
alla rotazione della Terra e viene rilevato, unico in Europa, nei
laboratori del Gran Sasso presso L'Aquila a circa 800 chilometri di
distanza"
My quick-and-dirty translation:
"Here lays the extreme interest, for instance, of the neutrino beam coming from CERN in Geneva, which traversing Alps and Appennines far underground, emerges to surface thanks to Earth's rotation and is detected, the only one in Europe, in the Gran Sasso laboratories next to L'Aquila, 800 kilometers away".
Oops. I guess the overzealous editor took a "curvature" and turned it into "rotation", with a funny underlying concept. Coriolis force ? Or maybe he thought neutrinos traveled slowly, so the Earth in the meantime would move away ?
Editors are needed, and they usually perform a very important task that cannot be waived. But editors are fallible, too. Before submitting a paper for editing, be sure to agree to have the last word on the final draft.
