Scientists Report Second Sighting of Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos
Scientists Report Second Sighting of Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: November 18, 2011
Few scientists are betting against Einstein yet, but the phantom neutrinos of Opera are still eluding explanation.
Related
Two months after scientists reported that they had clocked subatomic particles known as neutrinos going faster than the speed of light, to the astonishment and vocal disbelief of most of the world’s physicists, the same group of scientists, known as Opera, said on Friday that it had performed a second experiment that confirmed its first results and eliminated one possible explanation for how the experiment could have gone wrong.
But the group admitted that many questions remain. “This is not the end of the story,” said Antonio Ereditato of the University of Bern in Switzerland, the spokesman for the collaboration, explaining that physicists would not accept the result that neutrinos could go faster than light until other experiments had come up with the same conclusion. “We are convinced, but that is not enough in science,” he said.
Other physicists said they remained skeptical that the universe was about to be overturned.
The speed of light was established as the cosmic speed limit, at least for ordinary matter in ordinary space, in 1905 by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity (now known as special relativity), foreclosing the possibility of time travel into the past or of timely travel to other stars.
Neutrinos, though ghostly in many regards — they are able to traverse planets and walls of lead like light through a window, and to shape-shift from one of three varieties of the particle to another along the way — are part of the universe, and so there was no reason to expect that Einstein’s stricture should not apply to them as well.
But over the course of the last three years, in experiments designed to investigate this shape shifting, neutrinos produced at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and beamed underground to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, an underground facility about 450 miles away, arrived about 58 billionths of a second sooner than would a light beam, according to Opera. The group is based at Gran Sasso, which is near L’Aquila; CERN is in Geneva.
When these results were presented to a meeting at CERN in September, after a prairie fire of blog rumors, they were greeted by fierce skepticism. Among the problems with the original experiment, scientists said, was that the neutrinos were produced in bursts 10,000 billionths of a second long — much bigger than the discrepancy in arrival time.
Last month CERN retooled so that the neutrinos could be produced in shorter bursts, only 3 billionths of a second long, making it easier to match neutrinos at Gran Sasso with neutrinos at CERN, and the experiment was briefly repeated. The neutrinos still arrived early, about 62 billionths of a second early, in good agreement with the original result and negating the possibility, the Opera team said, that the duration of the neutrino pulse had anything to do with the results.
The details of both the first and second round of experiments are contained in a paper posted on the Internet at http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 and submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics. In response to reports that some members of the Opera group had refused to sign a preliminary version of the paper in September, Dr. Ereditato said of the new paper, “They all signed.”
Physicists said the new paper had answered some of the questions about the experiment, but many remain: for example, about how the clocks were synchronized between Geneva and Gran Sasso, and how the distance between them was ascertained. “It does appear that they have done a good job,” said John Learned, a neutrino physicist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who was not involved in the experiment. But, he added, “If there is a deep systematic error in the calculation of expected time difference, this remains.”
Alvaro de Rujula, a CERN theorist, said there were two interpretations of the experiment. “One is that they have stumbled upon a revolutionary discovery; the other, on which I would place my bet, is that they are still making and not finding the very same error.”
In the meantime, Einstein sleeps peacefully.
Asked if he had seen any interesting theoretical explanations of how neutrinos could violate the speed of light among the papers that have been flooding the internet these past two months, Dr. Ereditato demurred. “That’s not our business,” he said. “A good experimentalist tries to be as cool as possible.”
Dr. Learned and Dr. de Rujula both said there were no convincing theories out there yet. “The theory papers are amusing in that it more and more points out how very much trouble this result will cause, if verified,” Dr. Learned said in an e-mail.
He added, “Fun!”
Re: Scientists Report Second Sighting of Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos
Not sure how they could see them if they were faster than light.
/chuckles
Re: Scientists Report Second Sighting of Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos
Oh oh.....
Quote:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-...neutrino-test/
November 21, 2011 10:47 AM
Faster than light finding faulted in new neutrino test
.
http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/201...97_620x350.jpg A view of bricks used by the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Racking Apparatus detector (OPERA) at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory located under the Gran Sasso mountain on November 14, 2011. (ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP/Getty Images)
(CBS News) An international group of scientists says that the speed of light has not been broken, rejecting a "faster than light" particle claim made recently which cast doubt on Albert Einstein's century-old ideas about relativity.
The new paper, published in the online journal
arxiv.org/abs/1110.3763v2, contradicts the findings of fellow researchers at Italy's Gran Sasso laboratory, who said their experiments with a neutrino beam registered particles flying faster than the speed of light.
In that September test, scientists said they tracked beams of subatomic particles from their source in Geneva to a target 760 kilometers away in Italy moving 60 nanoseconds faster than a beam of light making the same trip. If that claim holds up, it would throw down the gauntlet to physics by shattering modern science's shared assumption about the speed of the universe. The initial findings of the OPERA project - an acronym for Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tracking Apparatus - generated a thrill throughout the scientific community - as well as a fair share of skepticism about the
methods used to carry out the test.
But the findings published over the weekend by fellow scientists at Gran Sasso working on an experiment known as ICARUS rejected that finding, saying their data "refute a superluminal (faster than light) interpretation of the OPERA result."
Re: Scientists Report Second Sighting of Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos
Not So Fast: Loose Wire Led To Stunning, Faster-Than-Light Particle Finding
Quote:
February 22, 2012
A loose connection between a timer and a computer led some of the world’s smartest particle physicists to conclude that certain tiny particles called neutrinos moved faster than the speed of light -- a declaration that shocked the science world and would have called into questions Einstein’s theories.
Citing sources familiar with the experiment, Science magazine’s website reported Wednesday that the 60-nanoseconds discrepancy that led to the startling speed conclusion came from a bad connection in a fiber optic cable connecting a GPS receiver (used to correct the timing of the neutrinos' flight) and a computer.
After tightening the connection and then remeasuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the cable, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed, the website said. (More data will be needed to confirm this hypothesis, the site cautioned.)
Einstein theorized that the speed of light in a vacuum -- approximately 186,280 miles per second, or about 700 million miles per hour -- is an absolute speed limit, and used the value in his famous formula, E = mc2.
Rewriting the theories based on this speed limit would have made an array of science fiction ideas more plausible -- even time travel.
The theory that some tiny bits of matter were whizzing along faster than Einstein thought possible was announced in Sept. 2011, when physicists with the CERN lab in Switzerland said they observed neutrinos completing a 454-mile racecourse faster than a beam of light would.
CERN representatives did not immediately respond to FoxNews.com requests to confirm the faulty wiring diagnosis.
When announcing their follow-up finding in November, scientists at the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) said that their tests were intended to exclude one potential effect that may have affected the original measurement.
"A measurement so delicate and carrying a profound implication on physics requires an extraordinary level of scrutiny," said Fernando Ferroni, president of the INFN.
Apparently, yet more scrutiny was required.
"It's very hard to find an error by reading a paper," particle physicist Rob Roser of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill., said Friday at an annual science meeting.
"What you need is for someone else to make the measurement. We'll see what happens."
Re: Scientists Report Second Sighting of Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos
This is a real bummer but consistent with science.
Re: Scientists Report Second Sighting of Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos
/chuckles
Good, glad they found the problem.
The other thing.....
I still don't see how they could "see" them in the first place. LOL!
