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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."
I am glad they went through the proper process of verifying all the hardware and have gotten to the bottom of this little fiasco - but wow, they have to be biting their lips in frustration.
I also expect a cable manufacturer is likely to be getting a strongly worded email in the near future.
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It should read "Faulty Cable Most Likely To Blame For Superluminal Neutrino Results". They haven't proved anything yet. They just found a problem that's very suggestive and they need to re-run the experiment after fixing/accounting for the problem.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
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.
By my watch...
Nullius in verba
Did they remember to plug it in with the direction marks pointing to the computer?
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
A neutrino walks into a bar. The bartender says, "We still don't serve neutrinos here".
Is there any way we can pin this on Julian Assange?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That's why I use Monster Cables for my neutrino experiments. It increases the roundness of the bass end, creates a punchier mid-range, and makes my neutrinos less superluminal.
We will never get off this rock. Interstellar travel is impossible, and always will be.
We will all grow old and die here, and that's it.
You must be a real blast at parties.
Exceeding lightspeed is in no way required for interstellar travel. The problems of interstellar travel are, in fact, quite tractable.
We (in the sense of you and me, specifically) will indeed never get off this rock. But our grandchildren might.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I love the 'Faster than light neutrino' story. It shows something about how science works... an unconfirmed but sensational result captures our imagination. Though fascinating, it is treated with skepticism by scientists including the group publishing the results. Alternative hypotheses challenging the result are examined, and many discarded.
Eventually the result will be supported by more experiments or found to be incorrect... maybe even the result of a loose cable.
The neutrino story also shows something about how science is reported in much of the press... Unconfirmed but sensational results are presented as true. Preliminary challenges to the result are also reported as true. By the time the story is done, news outlets have misreported a number of contradictory claims as fact. No wonder a significant subset of the population doesn't understand or even believe science.
"We (in the sense of you and me, specifically) will indeed never get off this rock. But our grandchildren might."
My grandfather said those exact words.
I'm betting you are as wrong as he was
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Hey, leave poor Marvin alone. He has a brain the size of a planet and that makes up for his sometimes less than eager personality!
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Right on the money ... http://xkcd.com/955/
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
at the moment they have merely found out that "data" sent over the fiber-optic cable arrives 60ns earlier then assumed
How does that happen? I've worked at fiber using telecom companies since 96 (customer and provider sites) and I've never heard of a loose cable causing 60 ns of constant delay. Random jitter as the connector bounces around? OK yeah. Intermittent loss? OK yeah.
You can trivially make a fiber "60 ns longer" but thats quite a length of extra fiber, not a tiny fraction of an inch.
My guess is someone thought they were purchasing a X yard long fiber cable, but the helpful installers put in a X meter long fiber without telling anyone, and the stereotypical telecom BS about loose connectors is the coverup for the situation. Or the gear is buggy, it stopped being buggy, and all the tech did was tighten the connectors, so "it must have been the connector". Uh huh, yeah, heard that one before.
A television repairman is condemned to Hell for his practices of deceiving and overcharging customers. On his orientation tour of the netherworld he is led past people boiling in pits of lava, having their organs pecked out by beasts and others being flayed, over and over. Thus his fear is great as he is taken down a cavern to his own assignment of eternal doom. A demon shows him to a door, which he opens to find leads to a seemingly endless cavern piled high with television sets, DVD players, cable decoders, etc. "You must fix each and every one of them", proclaims the demon. The repairman relaxes and says, "Well, that doesn't seem so bad after all." "Ah," replies the demon, "but every one of them has an intermittent problem."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The results could be wrong, but for another reason. When trouble shooting you usually think of dozens of potential way things could have cause the problem before tracking down the actual root cause. Jumping to conclusions simply gets everyone's hopes up that the mystery has been solved.
It was a bad cable.
Period.
So if you were in charge, you would just stop looking for the root cause which may go on to taint other results at CERN for years to come? Nothing is certain until it has been confirmed.
With all due respect, nothing personal, but the ideas you expressed are completely wrong. Kids need to learn that science is experimenting and debating and arguing and trying things that mostly don't work but sometimes they do. There is no cabal and smart people sometimes disagree, most importantly they disagree in a civilized manner. And getting excited and theorizing and double checking your work and then triple checking your work and lots of sweat and effort and long hours. Initial results are sometimes wrong. Where do errors come from? And sometimes how you deal with "failure" defines who you are, more than how you deal with "success".
Science is not (or should not be) a scholastic endeavor that we should try to make as boring and authoritarian and slow and uninteresting as possible. If anything try to make it the opposite, at least a little bit.
If this whole story makes one kid think, just a little bit, about physics, that makes it OK. This is the best thing thats happened to physics in years.
If science were as flaky as a reality TV show, then I'd support your position because somewhere in between is the greek ideal. But... there's a long way to go before we have to worry about that.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
These scientists were irresponsible in their dealings with their press.
I never saw a single irresposible statement from them. They were very clear that there was likely to be an error in their experiment. The press wasn't irresponsible either. Every article I read was balanced and careful to state that there may be a simple explaination.
They should have kept it strictly within the community ...
Who exactly is "the community"? Scientists are not a priesthood, and the public does not need to be "protected" from scientific debate.
They're really more like metaphorical grandchildren. Sort of like "the World of Tomorrow"—it's not actually coming within 24 hours, but it will eventually. Now extrapolate that time measurement—the duration between when flying cars were first promised and when they finally appeared and achieved widespread adoption, say. If we assume it takes a minimum of twelve years for someone to go from birth to reproductive functionality (to some this is a little harsh, I know, but that's biology for you; just remember that, to others drinking certain Monsanto-enhanced milk, it's three years excessive) then we need at least twenty-four years to get grandchildren.
So after eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty-six "tomorrows", we'll finally get off this rock.
Given that the amount of time involved in a "tomorrow" is already a hundred years and steadily growing, we will probably be a space-faring civilization within the next million years.
Not bad, when you think about it from a solar heat death perspective.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Uh many, many people predicted that it would turn out not to be true. An error was considered the most likely explanation from the beginning, even by the publishers.
And much like the XKCD author, everyone who predicted that it wouldn't be true would have been ecstatic to be wrong.
What I find much more amusing is all the people who instantly jumped on the result and assumed it was true and proof of whatever they wanted it to be proof of -- from 'science is all a lie' to 'my replacement for Relativity which The Man has stifled is now proven correct!'
The enemies of Democracy are
Bollocks, I am pretty sure it was always explained as an unexpected result, not a new discovery.
How would they do that?
It is far better for the public to see scientists acting openly, showing their data and asking for help. Science is a process, not a result. Trying to get the public to trust science by hiding things from them is precisely the wrong way to go about it. It is akin to suggesting they should trust the scientist because the scientist is always right rather than because the process of science works.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Without faster than light you can get off this rock but you cannot support a civilisation. The closest star is already 4 light years away. Even at light speed, a return trip would take 8 years and that is already too much to maintain the relationship required for a civilisation - after a few generations, there will be nothing in common between the 2 worlds.
As if the geekoid weirdo spouting off about terraforming Mars is the life of the party.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I recall my grandfathers. Both grew up on farms. Tilling was done with a plow pulled by draft animal. Lighting was by candle, kerosene lantern, or acetylene lamp. Water came via a bucket or hand pump from a well. One lived to see Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the Moon.
Once we talked about a few things, some prosaic, some not. His basic position was that after all the things which in his life had been generally considered impossible and which later came to pass, it seemed to him to be presumptuous to rule things in or out.
We've seen that Life exists where it can. I suspect that, whether in a form we may readily recognize or no, it may do so elsewhere. Perhaps we may, as well.
Meanwhile, check connections. [grin]
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.
Of course we may—if all of humanity's resources were reallocated appropriately, we could have a well-to-do colony on Mars by now. Nothing in 2001 but the monoliths were grossly impossible; not even the date. The issue, which I tried to hint at in my post, is that most people don't dream of a better tomorrow. They dream of retiring to neat little homes and having the simple, manageable lives that our ancestors were hard-wired for. They want this. And in between that and the stars, you have the layers upon layers of half-committal riff-raff; the money-gatherers and the rent-seekers who eternally race to build ant hills, wilfully and perpetually ignorant of their endeavours' futility. Kermidge, it very well may take us eight hundred thousand years to get into space for good; there are still not enough dreamers amongst us. We may have come along way in an amazingly short time, but we have rarely gone in the direction we were hoping. For that, we need to get over ourselves.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The bartender says "We don't allow your kind in here".
A faster-than-light neutrino walks into a bar.
Have gnu, will travel.
Thus you join a long line of people who said something is impossible, and were wrong.
First, technically 5 man-made objects are on their way to interstellar space (Pioneer 10 & 11, Voyager 1 & 2, and New Horizons). They are slow, but leaving the Solar System nonetheless.
Second, we have nuclear power. That is sufficient for "generation ships". Those travel only a small fraction of the speed of light, but with a nuclear power source you can keep a community going for generations until you arrive.
Third, nanotechnology has the promise of travel to other stars at zero effective time delay to the traveller, and speed of light actual speed. Here is how: you scan a person at atomic resolution. Then you send a *description* of their body, atom for atom via powerful laser. At the destination, a nanotech assembler builds a copy atom for atom. There are large practical challenges to doing this, but no new physics required. Sending photons describing which atoms takes about a million times less energy than sending the atoms themselves at near light-speed, so this method is vastly more efficient, and would be the first choice over antimatter or very big solar powered lasers. Those are the only ways to get more energy/kg in the vehicle than fusion that we know of, which is what you need to get substantial fraction of speed of light.
Fourth, perhaps cryostasis or life extension via cloning stem cells or some such will get developed, so even with a slow starship you can still get there.
Fifth, there is plenty to do expanding into the Solar System, including the Oort Cloud, before worrying about interstellar trips. How about we figure out how to mine the Near Earth asteroids first? They are closer in energy terms than the Moon, and it's mission energy which costs you in space, not physical distance. We can practice by mining space junk in orbit, which also helps fix the orbital debris problem.
Traveling at 100x voyager 1 will be relatively easy. It had almost no thrust (launched at low speed from earth, then picked up speed by using gravitational assists at planets.
An extended thrust vehicle would be dramatically faster.
Or put another way:
Voyager 1 has reached an amazing 1/17572 the speed of light. We can do better.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
This means 17% of al drunk driving incidents for about 5% of the driving population, meaning that drunk teenagers cause on average three times the incidents than adults per person.
Sorry but you are going to have to start shoveling. Consider that GPS can routinely produce location solutions measured in tens of meters in a small fraction of a second. Also consider that if you avarage the time signals recovered over long periods of time you can generate time bases that are very high granularity. I'll Quote from NIST.gov... "Tests between widely separated receivers have demonstrated standard uncertainties for time comparisons of less than 10 ns and relative standard uncertainties for frequency comparisons of less than 1 x 10-13, both for averaging times of 1 d. The frequency uncertainty decreases as the averaging time increases. The frequency uncertainty is limited by the relative standard uncertainty of the NIST primary frequency standard which is 2 x 10-15." That's not even for GPS, but for ground based radio. GPS is similar accuracy and 1x10-13 is better than a pico second after a day of observations.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Your assumptions are correct. Voyager's velocity of 17 km/s will not appreciably change, and it will escape the sun's well, as escape velocity at its current location is about 3.85 km/s.
Relativity is insignificant at 100 times Voyager's velocity as tau at 1700 km/s is .99998, or in other words, a 1000 year trip would be shortened by about 6 days from the traveler's perspective.
The Orion and Daedalus projects of the 60s and 70s had theoretically designed spacecraft capable of anywhere from 5 to 12% of c given materials and power sources available at the time or soon available. Even then the journey is many decades and relativistic effects, though more pronounced are still not very significant (tau ~= 0.993 at 12% of c). Of course, the political and economic will to engage in such things is non-existent, so these ideas remain firmly in the realm of science fiction. I believe that Freeman Dyson computed the economic cost of an Orion class starship and concluded it would be about the same as a year's worth of the United States GDP at the time (early 70s? Don't remember). JWST has cost overruns a millionth of that amortized over nearly 20 years and was/is in danger of getting canceled.
I think that it is possible someday that we will send robotic probes to nearby star systems, and maybe manned missions to follow, but I also believe that absent some singularity-level fundamental physics breakthrough before then such things are at least a century or two away from being given any serious consideration, and the designs of those vessels will not be much like anything talked about today. As it stands, I'm not even liking the odds of seeing humans on Mars before I die (I'm 44).
So, it seems that the previously calculated stddev was -5.9/+8.3ns, which is about double the certainty of the best COTS systems (it had better be, they're plugged directly into atomic clocks). Basically:
"A loose connection between the fiber link from a GPS receiver to a computer is thought to cause the 60 nanosecond delay; tightening the connection makes the delay through the fiber decrease. However, additional data has to be taken to test the hypothesis. A second error with the crystal oscillator is expected to have lengthened the reported flight-time of neutrinos. Repeat tests with short pulsed beams have been scheduled for May. The two errors affect the result in opposite ways. The OPERA collaboration has not released quantitative estimates of how the errors affect the results, and expect to check the effects directly when a bunched beam is available later in 2012."
So this thing is far from over...
Einstein was seen chuckling to himself and mumbling under his breath "you didn't think it was going to be that easy, did you?"
i would rather share a drink with him than the guy telling me i am gonna die alone on this planet just like everyone else....
From what I've read, you're supposed to go with the topic that's most likely to get you laid.
[Listen to us slashdorks speculating about what a party would be like.]
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade