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OPERA Group Repeats Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results
gbrumfiel writes "Earlier this year, the OPERA experiment made the extraordinary claim that they had seen neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. The experiment, located at Gran Sasso in Italy, saw neutrinos arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than expected from their starting point at CERN in Switzerland. Others have doubted OPERA's claim, but in a new paper, the group reaffirms its commitment to the measurement. 'It's slightly better than the previous result,' OPERA's physics coordinator Dario Autiero told Nature News. Most members of the collaboration who didn't sign the original paper out of skepticism have now come on board. But scientists outside the group still aren't sure. 'Independent checks are the way to go,' says Rob Plunkett, co-spokesman of a rival experiment called MINOS."
As others here noted last time this result came around, if neutrinos really travel that much faster than the speed of light, then we would have expected the neutrino burst from the 1987a supernova to arrive months, rather than hours, before the light came. Thus, I am skeptical.
if there's an effect here, it should probably be related to neutrinos-through-matter vs neutrinos-through-vacuum
That, or interaction with the gravitational field. Neutrinos from the supernova traveled through essentially flat spacetime, far from any masses.
General Relativity is a classical theory, but the underlying nature of reality is quantum. So General Relativity, like Newton's theory of gravity, is an approximation of reality. Now, I'm not saying that the neutrinos went faster than light, however, perhaps this experiment has finally revealed a hole in General Relativity in the way the equations are applied to the timing of the event.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
(Near re-post of http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2507746&cid=37936976)
OPERA shows light travels little bit slower than the fastest objects we've measured. A little while ago we heard that in galaxies far, far away, either the electric charge is larger, Plank's constant is smaller or the speed of light is smaller (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2507746). If it's the speed of light that's smaller, the required slow-down is of the same order of magnitude as the factor by which photons are slower than neutrinos as observed by OPERA.
Here's my take. There's a field of undetected particles (dark matter?) that refract light a tiny bit, and this field was denser in the early universe. This field would not affect the apparent speed of light as an observer moves through it, just as (ignoring dispersion) light traveling through moving glass doesn't pick up the glass' motion vector (i.e. this wouldn't manifest itself as the Luminiferous aether, which is experimentally disproved). Light from the 1987A supernova would not be delayed too much relative to the neutrinos because most of the journey was through regions of space with low dark matter density.
There: three mysteries (dark matter, OPERA neutrinos and the fine structure "constant") all tied together with a bow on top. If you know more physics than I (honours undergrad) and you think I've missed something, please tear into this hypothesis, either here or on my blog: http://many-ideas.blogspot.com/2011/11/ftl-neutrinos-and-fine-structure.html. I look forward to hearing from you!
Best,
LeDopore
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
1) Yes, it could, they've attempted to take that into account. The main error would be in the length of the neutrino pulse; a long pulse is easier to detect (I think ~2000 neutrinos, or perhaps even more) but it's hard to pin down a precise time. The repeat experiment used very short pulses, which are harder to detect (~20 neutrinos) but which yield much more precise timings.
2) All observations so far are suggesting that neutrinos have a positive mass (or, to be more picky, that at least two of the neutrino species have a positive mass) of the order of a tenth of an electron volt or less. (Also, I think it would involve an imaginary mass to move faster than light, at least if you want to stick within current relativity - this result would suggest we might not want to do that, though.)
3) Yes. For instance, if we're confined to a 3-brane -- basically, a three-dimensional sheet that we and everything around us is trapped on -- and neutrinos are allowed to leak slightly from the brane then little kinks and ripples in the brane will let them take short-cuts through the other seven spatial dimensions. Gravity can do the same, but the idea is that neutrinos would be more tightly trapped to the brane, while gravitons can roam freely.
The 60 LnS thick hadron stop, and neutrinos getting to a detector 60 nS too soon is just plain suspicious.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds