A Small Glimmer of Hope For Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos

Posted by timothy on Friday February 24, 2012 @05:02PM from the wouldn't-put-much-money-on-it dept.

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."

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Re:Poor Quality Assurance does not boost confidenc by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-24 18:16 · Score: 5, Interesting

It's more like CERN isn't going to pull any punches and will release all the information they have about things instead of holding it back to make themselves look good.
Hell, some people seem to think CERN only did one experiment then screamed about faster than light. Instead, they did hundreds if not THOUSANDS of experiments before releasing a paper with a cautioning tone, asking for others to attempt replication or determine what could be the issue.
The fact that they found two *potential* issues, doesn't detract from the fact that they're an extremely cautious and skeptical group.