Dear Giotis, they were formally at least 99.9999999% certain, that’s what the 6-7 sigma confidence level means, and even when some possible “qualitatively different errors” are considered as possibilities, their certainty is still vastly higher than 99%.

As I wrote in an update, Pryke of BICEP2 says that the rumors about the planned retractions by BICEP are pure bullshit.

99% is no real certainty. It’s just a laymen’s myth that 99% is high enough to treat something as a certainty. It’s less than 2 sigma. In hard sciences, if something comes out to confirm a theory at a 99% level, a scientist doesn’t consider it even as significant evidence to be carefully studied!

— Lubos Motl

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license. Author: Mwtoews

In statistics, the 68–95–99.7 rule, also known as the three-sigma rule or empirical rule, states that nearly all values lie within three standard deviations of the mean in a normal distribution.

68.27% of the values lie within one standard deviation of the mean. Similarly, 95.45% of the values lie within two standard deviations of the mean. Nearly all (99.73%) of the values lie within three standard deviations of the mean.

— Wikipedia on 68–95–99.7 rule

2014.06.03 Tuesday ACHK