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Faulty Cable To Blame For Superluminal Neutrino Results
smolloy writes "It would appear that the hotly debated faster-than-light neutrino observation at CERN is the result of a fault in the connection between a GPS unit and a computer. This connection was used to correct for time delays in the neutrino flight, and after fixing the correction the researchers have found that the time discrepancy appears to have vanished."
There's no definite statement from OPERA or CERN yet. Right now this is just a rumor. This also is definitely not the first suggested explanation. Let's wait and see.
The cable transmitted the signal 60ns faster than the time used in their compensation. I wouldn't call that defective.
Either the cable is shorter than they thought, or it's propagation factor is higher than specified, or they simply used the wrong number in their original calculations.
Way too early to blame anything on the cable manufacturer.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Ahem. *bullshit*.
The heliopause, which has not yet been reached by Voyager 1 is apparently 23 x 10^9 km from earth. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to our sun is 4.366 light years away which is 4.1306 x 10^13 km away.
If it has taken 38 years for Voyager 1 to reach the Heliopause, it would take 1,795.9 times as long to reach Alpha Centauri at that speed which comes out to something like 68,000 years. I'm assuming a couple of things of course:
* the speed so far is roughly the speed it will continue to travel
* it can escape the sun's gravitational well.
Suppose we are somehow miraculously able to accomplish the following:
* we send a system powerful enough to transmit an intelligible signal to us across 4.5 light years of space
* we somehow manage to travel 100 times faster than Voyager 1
You're still talking about roughly 680 years for it to get there. There might be some tiny relativistic effects that come into play, but I doubt they would alter the situation much. Are you sending humans? If so, you have to dramatically increase the weight of the vehicle to accommodate life-sustaining water/air/energy in which case you also need shit loads of propellant if you want to slow down on the other end. Forget entirely about the difficulty of insuring the survival of roughly 20 generations of humans against the problems of cosmic radiation and health and reproductive problems related to roughly a millenium spent weightless and getting fried by space rays.