Speed-of-light experiments yield baffling result at LHC

sounds like they consistently came up with an off-by-.00000006 secs... feels like a systematic error they didnt account for, or they wouldn't have gotten a definite number.

sounds like they consistently came up with an off-by-.00000006 secs... feels like a systematic error they didnt account for, or they wouldn't have gotten a definite number.

"We tried to find all possible explanations for this," the report's author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration told BBC News on Thursday evening.

"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't."

"When you don't find anything, then you say 'well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this'."

In other words yes it could be a mistake but is not like they're saying that is 100% proved that the neutrino traveled faster than light, heck I would say themself don't still belive it "My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing - then I would be relieved," Dr Ereditato told BBC News.

In other words yes it could be a mistake but is not like they're saying that is 100% proved that the neutrino traveled faster than light, heck I would say themself don't still belive it "My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing - then I would be relieved," Dr Ereditato told BBC News.

they're saying "we looked for systematic error everywhere we could and couldn't find a mistake, but understandably we are biased towards something nifty happening and putting our names on it so we want everyone else to make sure we aren't idiots".

honestly, i'm fairly sure they've been blinded by excitement and forgot something.

they're saying "we looked for systematic error everywhere we could and couldn't find a mistake, but understandably we are biased towards something nifty happening and putting our names on it so we want everyone else to make sure we aren't idiots".

honestly, i'm fairly sure they've been blinded by excitement and forgot something.

Although its quite unprofessional its quite common, since a good amount of scientist got big (if not huge) egos and would like to have their name at least on some textbook as the ones that discovered something important but at least their asking someone else to prove or disprove (although they would prefer the former) it.

I bet if its disproven its going to happen what most of the time with this type of news and will never be said that it was disproven.

they're saying "we looked for systematic error everywhere we could and couldn't find a mistake, but understandably we are biased towards something nifty happening and putting our names on it so we want everyone else to make sure we aren't idiots".

honestly, i'm fairly sure they've been blinded by excitement and forgot something.

I guess you are right, and the scientists looking only on that for 3 years must be wrong.

I guess you are right, and the scientists looking only on that for 3 years must be wrong.

This is the silliest response i could hope to see in this thread considering 30x that amount of years would be invalidated if this were true. I guess everyone looking at physics in the past 100 years must be wrong.

This is the silliest response i could hope to see in this thread considering 30x that amount of years would be invalidated if this were true. I guess everyone looking at physics in the past 100 years must be wrong.

Well, if they'd always had sensors good enough to detect continental drift throughout the hundreds of years, this probably would hold.

This is the silliest response i could hope to see in this thread considering 30x that amount of years would be invalidated if this were true. I guess everyone looking at physics in the past 100 years must be wrong.

Thousands of years of people knowing that the earth is flat sure is reliable, too.

It only takes a single instance to take down a law. Something that makes it go outside of it. Laws accept no exceptions. Einstein did the same back in the day, you know?

This is the silliest response i could hope to see in this thread considering 30x that amount of years would be invalidated if this were true. I guess everyone looking at physics in the past 100 years must be wrong.

You speak as if this didn't already happen before with relativity and quantum mechanics proving a lot of Classic physics was wrong in the first place.

Thousands of years of people knowing that the earth is flat sure is reliable, too.

It only takes a single instance to take down a law. Something that makes it go outside of it. Laws accept no exceptions. Einstein did the same back in the day, you know?

the thing is, they came up with an exact number, and not a range of numbers. i'd be more willing to accept it if it was a range, because that would suggest the neutrinos aren't all travelling at the same speed. but the way they posit their findings looks like every measurement was off by .00000006 seconds. they never claim it as an average time, unless i misread. to me, that doesn't suggest anything about the speed of light being wrong, because speed/time are essentially continuous and not every particle will travel at exactly the same speed.

i would not be opposed to opening the possibility of time travel or faster than light travel or whatever implications a rewrite of current physics laws with respect to this finding would bring. this just doesn't sound like this'll do it to me, and i'll stick to that opinion until some solid evidence is offered to the contrary.

the thing is, they came up with an exact number, and not a range of numbers. i'd be more willing to accept it if it was a range, because that would suggest the neutrinos aren't all travelling at the same speed. but the way they posit their findings looks like every measurement was off by .00000006 seconds. they never claim it as an average time, unless i misread. to me, that doesn't suggest anything about the speed of light being wrong, because speed/time are essentially continuous and not every particle will travel at exactly the same speed.

i would not be opposed to opening the possibility of time travel or faster than light travel or whatever implications a rewrite of current physics laws with respect to this finding would bring. this just doesn't sound like this'll do it to me, and i'll stick to that opinion until some solid evidence is offered to the contrary.

I'm not saying they are right, or they are wrong. Just saying that "people were right for a hundred years, they have to be wrong" is the poorest excuse. I don't like to rule out stuff so easily.

the thing is, they came up with an exact number, and not a range of numbers. i'd be more willing to accept it if it was a range, because that would suggest the neutrinos aren't all travelling at the same speed. but the way they posit their findings looks like every measurement was off by .00000006 seconds. they never claim it as an average time, unless i misread. to me, that doesn't suggest anything about the speed of light being wrong, because speed/time are essentially continuous and not every particle will travel at exactly the same speed.

Lol. Of course it's an average time. Would you have wanted to read a table of 15,000 entries of record data? Because that's how in the region of how many they made.

Lol. Of course it's an average time. Would you have wanted to read a table of 15,000 entries of record data? Because that's how in the region of how many they made.

yes, because then i can see they're claiming an average time, and i can look at the variance in the measurements. they don't provide a variance, and without that, i'll remain skeptical. they don't claim any error or variation, i don't believe.

I'm not saying they are right, or they are wrong. Just saying that "people were right for a hundred years, they have to be wrong" is the poorest excuse. I don't like to rule out stuff so easily.

i was never trying to put that forward as my reasoning, but yeah another post or 2 seem to suggest that.

yes, because then i can see they're claiming an average time, and i can look at the variance in the measurements. they don't provide a variance, and without that, i'll remain skeptical. they don't claim any error or variation, i don't believe.

Looked at wiki for some source and found this not sure if its what your looking for since I'm too lazy to read it, but seems to be.

Looked at wiki for some source and found this not sure if its what your looking for since I'm too lazy to read it, but seems to be.

ahh thanks actually. the media lose so much in their translations from science to english. they expected ~7.4ns of systematic error, and got many measurements way too far outside of that to be from what they accounted for.

this is a few interviews by scientific american of other physicists more or less saying "hmm, i bet they forgot something". personally, i think the most interesting one is the guy who says neutrinos from a supernova would have arrived 4 years sooner if they could travel 60ns faster than light. and that begs the question of whether we were even looking for neutrinos associated with supernovae 4 years prior to that observation.

has there been any more news on the validity of this? I really want to see another group perform the experiment.

give it some time, i'm sure it's being scutinized closely right now but i doubt anyone is expedient enough at cutting red tape to get money for an independent test within a week of the press release for the initial publication.

I'm saying this with no base since I don't remember where I read it or how true it could've been maybe someone made it up but I read that there's the possibility that the neutrino took a "shortcut" through a wormhole.

has there been any more news on the validity of this? I really want to see another group perform the experiment.

Yes and no, the Japanese lab that specializes in Neutrino's got crashed by the tsunami / earthquake and can't do any test + results till 2012 (hint, hint? ), and there was also something else with a USA lab, but I don't recall what that was.

Also, you can't just start doing this experiment if you want to, because you can only "create" neutrino beams by particle smashing, that's why CERN was involved in Europe. The Italy lab was only the receiving part.

There won't be any other results till mid 2012... unless some group is going to set up something new because of this anomaly.

Till that time, it's just:
- Results are wrong
- Neutrino's can partially escape the grasp of time due to their lack of mass or energy, resulting in time evolving faster around them, then time evolves around us who are bound by energy and mass which controls our "time-speed".

Fresh from slashdot;

"Two weeks ago, researchers claimed particles called neutrinos were travelling faster-than-light and violating the laws of special relativity. But now it looks as though general relativity might be behind the experiment's unusual result. An independent analysis claims that the original experiment, known as OPERA, failed to take into account differences in earth's gravitational field between the neutrino source and the OPERA detector. As Nature News reports, gravity can distort time according to Einstein's theory, and the effect could explain why neutrinos appear to arrive 60 nanoseconds ahead of schedule. The OPERA team is now reviewing the new analysis."

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/1109.6160