The Davis-Barnes Effect

I just read this piece of a colloquium transcription of Irving Langmuir's talk "Pathological Science".
Langmuir: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Langmuir
Talk: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~ken/Langmuir/langA.htm

The summary of it is that Davis and Barnes made a counting measurements to try to confirm the Bohr theory of the hydrogen atom. Before the experiment, they computed what conditions should yield positive results. When they set their detector to the "wrong settings", they counted low event rates, and when they set their detector to the "right settings", they counted high event rates. Langmuir was intrigued when he witnessed Davis and Barnes throw away seemingly valid counts... and at other times count orders of magnitude more! It turns out that they just truly believed that some events should be thrown out for some such reason, but I don't know how they counted more events.

The point is that they did not do their experiment blindly, and they miscounted the data without believing that they were effecting the outcome!

I feel like this could easily happen with the stress and anticipation to find something new at CERN. Effectively, a whole field of research hangs on the line. Hopefully we have a healthy enough competition that we won't let people get away with it.