They did not declare that some fundamental fact was wrong, it was the media who did that. They only communicated that they had a measurement which contradicts phisics and that they were unable to find a mistake in their experiment. What should they have done in your eyes? There is not really a alternative (at least if you want to work scintifically) then to communicate what meassurments you got. After all it is possible someone else will see the mistake which they themselves did not see.

found the mistake before releasing their 'results'? radical approach, i know.

Getting more publicity before a next found-rising drive among the CERN member states?
They actually do some rocket-science-like sophisticated things there so they should know better that all kinds of phenomena can distort the measurements and not jump to conclusions.

In the scientific world it's called "peer review." Normally "press review" is left to the political realm. All these guys have done now is made themselves "those crazy professors who didn't check their math" to their peers. Live and learn I guess.

They suspected that the results were due to a mistake. They'd tried to find the error themselves, and been unable to, so published it for their peers, to see if they could find a mistake.

Turning out to be a hardware fault makes me though.

In scientific word not everyone likes peer reviews because it strikes ego of senior colleagues thats what at least I realized working with my mates.
The funny part of the whole enterpreis is that some folks are academic and do the simulations however accurate they are an have clear concept. Then you get the guys who are going to implement the whole thing (experiment or contol part) and program devices e.g. DSP and FPGA. Practically only electronics engineer knows what the whole damn thing really does and needs to debug it. At the end of the day, the results arrive on prof A's and B's desks and the discussions ensue. They cheerfully analyze them trying to contradict the theories or build the new ones Bottom line - conference anyone If there is an error somewhere, they'll try to figure it out all by themselves not having a clue that the system engineer inserted a counter or interrupt in the wrong place inside his software

I don't claim it must have been like this, but you get a whole picture. This kind of things can happen all the time. Therefore you must be 100% sure of what you publish...

Above statement re-affirms you shouldn't take a an 'I.T. guy' seriously.

On the contrary, you must make sure that you fully understand what has been implemented and consequences thereof

Have they actually confirmed that it was a hardware problem or are they once more jumping the gun?

In fact, the OPERA collaboration hasn't confirmed anything yet. They just noted that they have found two possible sources of systematic error (one that could lead to an overestimate of the neutrino time-of-flight and one that could underestimate it). So the jury is still out until they have studied the uncertainties.

I'm willing to bet that once they have figured those errors in, the value that they will get will be consistent with the currently accepted value of c. Surprise...

Fixed that for ya.

Maybe a fuller report here, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17139635

We need to correct the thread title now.