Oh, "scary" is the right word, notwithstanding everything you just said, which is all true.
It takes courage to stand in front of every camera on earth and claim to have measured something impossible, no matter how cautious you are, and no matter how gracious everyone else is. It takes courage to knowingly and deliberately turn yourself into the butt of jokes in foreign languages whose names you don't even know, all on the very slim chance that this thing you can't explain is something breathtakingly awesome, Isaac Newton-awesome, Albert Einstein's 1905-awesome. It was bound to be embarrassing in the end, and lo and behold it is shaping up to be exactly as embarrassing as every one of my fellow experimentalists knew it would be, and I can't decide whether to laugh, cry, or salute, because when you've spent months or years of your life in utter despair, trying to get your experiment to produce something halfway believable, or redoing six months of work because a broken fridge probably contaminated the first batch, or trembling as you cross-check the simulation code the week before your thesis is due, you've learned how it feels: Awful.
I'll go with "salute": Let's all raise a glass to these folks and be grateful that they are on the road to finding their problem, rather than being haunted by uncertainty forever. May their next result be twice as exciting and only half as wrong!
It takes courage to stand in front of every camera on earth and claim to have measured something impossible, no matter how cautious you are, and no matter how gracious everyone else is. It takes courage to knowingly and deliberately turn yourself into the butt of jokes in foreign languages whose names you don't even know, all on the very slim chance that this thing you can't explain is something breathtakingly awesome, Isaac Newton-awesome, Albert Einstein's 1905-awesome. It was bound to be embarrassing in the end, and lo and behold it is shaping up to be exactly as embarrassing as every one of my fellow experimentalists knew it would be, and I can't decide whether to laugh, cry, or salute, because when you've spent months or years of your life in utter despair, trying to get your experiment to produce something halfway believable, or redoing six months of work because a broken fridge probably contaminated the first batch, or trembling as you cross-check the simulation code the week before your thesis is due, you've learned how it feels: Awful.
I'll go with "salute": Let's all raise a glass to these folks and be grateful that they are on the road to finding their problem, rather than being haunted by uncertainty forever. May their next result be twice as exciting and only half as wrong!