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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."
They make you reset the shield harmonics
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
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.
While I want to think that we could be on the verge of some new physics discoveries... I have my doubts. It very likely could be that OPERA is still using a flawed method and thus seeing flawed results.
That being said, if and when other (independent) groups can verify this claim, that will be an exciting day.
Isaac
Given my experiences in Italy, if the neutrinos arrived exactly when they were supposed to, Italians would consider that about 15 minutes too early.
They're probably still trying to sync with time.windows.com. It's a common mistake.
I notice that lunch-time definitely passes faster than any other time.
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.
Unfortunately for us, replicating the experiment with a second team in a second location entirely from scratch will be extremely expensive, given that this CERN location used for the experiment is unique.
There are other long-baseline neutrino experiments out there, such as MINOS.
Opera is faster than light? That should put Google's chrome out of business.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Ummm, no? They didn't just use GPS clocks, they physically carried atomic clocks from one location to the other. Look up the actual science behind what they did, it's pretty interesting. Oh, and relativistic factors of GPS systems is pretty standard learning in basic science. Maybe there was a compounding effect that they missed... but I doubt it. That article is 100% pure speculation. And it's bullshit, quite frankly. Check out this: Ars article for what the team did. (They also ran photons between the sites to check the time, in addition to GPS and portable atomic clocks.)
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
But we should also stop assuming that the theory of relativity is more reliable than it is or that our knowledge is anything other than incomplete and premature. I think it is only a matter of time until we something that can exceed C.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Nobody's going to can relativity on the basis of one experiement done at one facility, even if it's consistently repeatable. There's just too much chance that you overlooked something, no matter how careful you are (and OPERA, to their credit, have apparently been *very* careful). The problem is that there's no other facility that can do this experiment at the required precision, and with no idea as to what we're actually seeing, there's no way to design another experiment to get another look at it. The next big news will be when MINOS's upgrades come on line in 2012. Then we'll have independent confirmation (or not).
These browser release schedules are getting out of control. First, FireFox considered updating as often as once every 5 weeks. Now, Opera is going to top them by developing faster than light technology so they can post updates before their predecessors were released! (Side note: I'm now running Opera version 10,573 and it's great. I expect to be able to update to 10,574 yesterday.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Whatever it is, I give them props for trying to solve this in the most honest, transparent way possible and remaining open to being wrong. They're exemplifying "good" scientific method and that makes them more credible to begin with.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
In Italy, at least the Tachyon's run on time.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Beside that, are all neutrino's equal?
No, sort of. There are three known "kinds" of neutrinos: electron, muon, and tauon. And they seem to randomly change from one kind to another. This is why I don't dismiss the possibility that neutrinos might travel faster than c. If they do, it wouldn't be the first completely bizarre thing about them.
Uh, just to be specific, you're talking about the chirality of neutrinos. The way you phrase it, it sounds like an electron is a type of neutrino. It isn't. There are electron neutrinos, but they have no charge. They are merely part of the same family of leptons as the electron, hence the name. You probably knew that, but I had to do a re-read to figure out that that's not necessarily what you meant.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Ok, several stuff there.
Unlikely (but way more likely than FTL neutrinos). They check that stuff a lot, they know how to do the math... But they are still humans, so there can be a problem somewhere. Nobody was able to find it up to now, people are still trying.
It is a mathematical consequence of some models of the universe. Other models don't bring it as a consequence. Remember, we don't know how the universe behaves, we just have clues.
I was corrected recently here on /. while saying that. Ends up that you can't keep current physics at all, so any prediction based on current physics (and yours is based on Relativity and Maxell laws) is not reliable.
Can you prove it? I'm trying to for a time, but it seems that it doesn't follow from the postulate of paradox-free time travel.
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