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Neutrinos measured going faster than the speed of light

S

Sparky

New Member
arg-fallbackName="Sparky"/>
Still a little early to say the experiment was not flawed in some way but CERN scientists have spent months checking the equipment and results. The results suggest that neutrinos reached the end of a 732km track 60ns quicker than a photon would with a margin of error of only 10ns. CERN have now presented the results and are asking others to repeat the experiment and confirm the results.

News articles on it here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484
http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/5671848/Pillar-of-physics-challenged
 
arg-fallbackName="televator"/>
I'm not sure what something like this would establish, if found to be verifiable, but it sounds big to me.
 
arg-fallbackName="Welshidiot"/>
I reckon that it means that now we've invested all those billions into CERN, the laws of physics are going to change just to piss us off.
 
arg-fallbackName="Squawk"/>
Welshidiot said:
I reckon that it means that now we've invested all those billions into CERN, the laws of physics are going to change just to piss us off.
Click to expand...

Lol

I really hope this stands up, would open up so many news avenues of research and would throw open so many new questions. Would love to see the reactions of those who thought discovery was just about complete.
 
arg-fallbackName=")O( Hytegia )O("/>
Today, CERN announced a new discovery that would shake Science for the rest of time!

The Universe is Weird.

No, that's the announcement. "The Universe is Weird."
 
arg-fallbackName="ImprobableJoe"/>
Let's read the paper first, and see if this is something real or just bad science reporting.
 
arg-fallbackName="Unwardil"/>
Well, to the question of 'what doesn't this mean?' if it's true, we sort of have to re-write... All of physics.

Not that I'll be surprised when they discover that it's possible for some things to go faster than light. They're not going to be obvious when light has been the thing you have been using in order to see things with.

Most detection systems currently sort of work on the crash test principle. If you imagine electrons as a car, then we detect the shape of objects by running cars into them and then studying how the car crashes in order to discern information about the thing we hit. This is also how all light detection works although I suppose in this metaphor, we actually only see things if a piece of the car bounces off the thing it hit and ricochets back into the camera, meaning it takes an absolute butt ton of crashed cars to actually see anything at all.

At any rate, when your primary method of detecting things comprises smashing slow moving cars into stationary things and studying the carnage, it's no wonder that things like say airplanes, might go completely unnoticed to you for a very long time. Not because they aren't there and not because they aren't very very obvious when you know how to look for them, but simply because your method of detection is simply incapable of detecting them.

If you imagine catapulting cars randomly into the air in hopes of it randomly colliding with a passing airplane, that's what some of the experiments have been like. And we don't even know if we're near an airport when we're doing it. In other words, there may be particles that are going so many times the speed of light as to be totally undetectable by car hurling means and it's only the ones very very near the ground that we can even get a car high enough into the air to collide with it.
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparky"/>
Here is the paper if anyone is interested in reading it:

http://static.arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897.pdf
 
arg-fallbackName="Laurens"/>
I'm going to remain skeptical on this until it is shown beyond reasonable doubt that these results weren't due to a technical error.
 
arg-fallbackName="Master_Ghost_Knight"/>
Sparky said:
Here is the paper if anyone is interested in reading it:

http://static.arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897.pdf
Click to expand...

Hum... Ok I'm going to dismiss this claim right out of hand for 1 simple reason, they used the GPS to syncronize clocks. This is a serious mistake because of errors in atmospheric delay which is of stocastic nature and it is not the same everywhere. i.e. they could have never synchronized the clocks to the precision requiered to make that measurment, it just can't be done.
 
arg-fallbackName="ohcac"/>
Physicists are saying "anomalous result" and one physicist has already pointed out an embarrassing gaffe by the CERN team that conducted the experiment: the paper states a measurement discrepancy of 6 standard deviations, when it is actually *at most* two standard deviations, which is not enough to qualify as a really breakthrough discovery.

Even if it turns out to be true, all of the headlines hastily stating "PHYSICS TURNED ON ITS HEAD" are still examples of poor science reporting. Another example about how the popular press yells "EUREKA!" while actual, qualified scientists are more like "Hmmm... that's funny. I wonder what CERN did incorrectly?".
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
It won't remotely rewrite all of physics, even if verified that this isn't a measurement anomaly.

It's far too early yet to sound the death knell of SR, though. I can think of at least two extant hypotheses that could account for this, not least the hidden dimensions postulated by M-Theory.
 
arg-fallbackName="Pulsar"/>
Master_Ghost_Knight said:
Hum... Ok I'm going to dismiss this claim right out of hand for 1 simple reason, they used the GPS to syncronize clocks. This is a serious mistake because of errors in atmospheric delay which is of stocastic nature and it is not the same everywhere. i.e. they could have never synchronized the clocks to the precision requiered to make that measurment, it just can't be done.
Click to expand...
Did you even bother to read the paper? We're not dealing with a bunch of amateurs here.
A key feature of the neutrino velocity measurement is the accuracy of the relative time
tagging at CERN and at the OPERA detector. The standard GPS receivers formerly installed at
CERN and LNGS would feature an insufficient ~100 ns accuracy for the TOFν measurement.
Thus, in 2008, two identical systems, composed of a GPS receiver for time-transfer applications
Septentrio PolaRx2e [16] operating in "common-view" mode [17] and a Cs atomic clock
Symmetricom Cs4000 [18], were installed at CERN and LNGS (see Figs. 3, 5 and 6).

The Cs4000 oscillator provides the reference frequency to the PolaRx2e receiver, which is
able to time-tag its "One Pulse Per Second" output (1PPS) with respect to the individual GPS
satellite observations. The latter are processed offline by using the CGGTTS format [19]. The
two systems feature a technology commonly used for high-accuracy time transfer applications
[20]. They were calibrated by the Swiss Metrology Institute (METAS) [21] and established a
permanent time link between two reference points (tCERN and tLNGS) of the timing chains of
CERN and OPERA at the nanosecond level. This time link between CERN and OPERA was
independently verified by the German Metrology Institute PTB (Physikalisch-Technische
Bundesanstalt) [22] by taking data at CERN and LNGS with a portable time-transfer device [23].
The difference between the time base of the CERN and OPERA PolaRx2e receivers was
measured to be (2.3 ,± 0.9) ns [22]. This correction was taken into account in the application of
the time link.
Click to expand...
 
arg-fallbackName="Master_Ghost_Knight"/>
Pulsar said:
Did you even bother to read the paper? We're not dealing with a bunch of amateurs here.
Click to expand...
Admitedly I read it in diagonal. A given that they did dedicate a good amount to GPS timimg I was convinced that is what they did, they are not amateurs but it wouldn't be te fist time this mistake would have been made, now it is my mistake. I do retract my statment.
 
arg-fallbackName="Anachronous Rex"/>
neutrinos.png


For your enjoyment.
 
arg-fallbackName="scalyblue"/>
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1623

http://xkcd.com/882/

Can't embed either because they're too tall x.x
 
arg-fallbackName="Leçi"/>
So any news about this? Last time it was on the news they said the second test confirmed the first result...great, what now?
 
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