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A Small Glimmer of Hope For Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos
sciencehabit writes "The CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva has confirmed Wednesday's report that a loose fiber-optic cable may be behind measurements that seemed to show neutrinos outpacing the speed of light. But the lab also says another glitch could have caused the experiment to underestimate the particles' speed. The other effect concerns an oscillator that gives its readings time stamps synchronized to GPS signals. Researchers think correcting for an error in this device would actually increase the anomaly in neutrino velocity, making the particles even speedier than the earlier measurements seemed to show."
Only on Slashdot would arn armchair critic post crap about CERN's 'workmanship' late on a Friday night.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Doing measurements like this is extremely tricky, as it exceeds the usual equipment precision by a lot. I expect that confirmation either way will at least require months, possibly years. I would not be surprised if they need to recalibrate a lot of equipment and may have to build some especially for this experiment. Anyways. in the course of doing so, they will learn a lot and the improved measurement techniques developed will be available in the future. This is science at work. I do not find any fault with the researchers, just the press coverage. But the press has never understood how science works or what scientists do.
Extraordinary claims also require extraordinary proof. So the original measurement would not have been enough anyways, even if no flaws were found. I also seem to remember that they never claimed FTL neutrinos, but an effect they could not explain, leaving it open whether this was a measurement error or something not consistent with current physical theory.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
But a lot of discoveries border on the measurement error initially, otherwise the discovery would have been made earlier with even cruder instruments.
Science doesn't work that way. It's not "should we believe him that there was a wolf", it's "is his account plausible as a real wolf sighting, is there any wolf traces and should we expend resources to try and confirm/disprove his claim"
Yes, they found one result "too good to be true" and now they're checking that result. If you'd RTFA (outlandish, I know) you'd notice this snippet at the end:
The two effects will get a new round of tests in May, when the two labs are scheduled to make velocity measurements with short-pulsed beams designed to give readings much more precise than scientists have achieved so far.
In teaching engineering, I'm told, part of the experience is learning how engineering projects failed.
Perhaps science needs to include the same. Perhaps we should be teaching why experiments got the wrong result, or why an effect was not detected when it should have been. It could be anything from equipment malfunctions to sampling and interpretation bias.
First of all, they're not making "demonstrably insane claims". They published the data they collected during experiments and are looking for explanation - which might be "experimental error". Discarding anything as "demonstrably insane" before you investigate the reasons for data you got is just the other side of accepting anything you hear as true without investigation. Sadly, latter is modus operandi for modern journalism, which is why this all got blown out of proportion.
Second, you sound like you personally invested in development of FTL engine at CERN and now found out it was a fraud.
OPERA was looking for tau neutrinos and found them, AFAIK, and FTL neutrino sighting was just a strange data point they will now try and reproduce to shut this case.