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Faster-Than-Light Particle Results To Be Re-Tested
surewouldoutlaw writes "After the astonishing news from CERN that the OPERA experiment had detected neutrinos traveling faster than light speed, challenging Einstein's theory of special relativity, there has been some skepticism over the results. Now Fermilab, near Chicago, has announced it will attempt to replicate the experimental results within four to six months."
OPERA has just found that either neutrinos travel 0.03% faster than photons we've measured, or their equipment has an unknown systematic error. Assuming there's no equipment error, I would find it more palatable to assume that light around Earth travels a bit below c and that neutrinos travel closer to c. What we think of as vacuum could really be a medium with refractive index 1.0003, perhaps due to a uniform background of weakly-interacting particles (maybe even dark matter) that affect photons but not neutrinos.
I have a physics undergrad degree; if there's someone here with better qualifications, would you care to weigh in on the idea that c could be 0.03% faster than the speed of light we measure on Earth?
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
Yes, I would agree. 184 coauthors can keep a secret, if 183 are dead.
Note that there is already a theoretical paper out on these results, so it has been percolating around a little. Note also that this paper says
The MINOS collaboration reported a measurement of the muonic neutrino velocities that hints to super-luminal propagation, very recently confirmed at 6 [sigma] by OPERA.
Do I smell a priority fight coming ?
You say that because you're probably not intimately familiar with just *how* well established General Relativity is.
It's a theory which has survived decades of absurdly rigorous testing. Being cautious in how you present it is absolutely the correct approach - and far more responsible then how say, the debacle over cold fusion was handled.
These are not trivial measurements to make, nor is there any obvious explanatory theory that they confirm. They also aren't a gross excess - well bounded, but a very small difference which is on the same timescale as the delays in the processing speeds of the individual components of the apparatus. It's only us sci-fi nerds who fully expect (want) FTL to be possible and Relativity broken somehow.