Merged Puzzling results from CERN

[Soapy Sam]

I'm with Sol on this one. The more I look at it, especially considering the new criticism of the CERN-OPERA group's statistical analysis, the more I think that, sadly, we could be looking at another cold-fusion fiasco.

The social aspects of this affair may be as interesting as the content. I , too found it odd that they went down the route of apparently seeking maximum popular publicity for the results. Simply publishing the paper and informing the physics community would seem to have been enough. The word would surely have reached the people best able to comment fast enough. The comparison with the Pons & Fleischmann affair had also occurred to me .
Is this another case of "sexing up science"?

 

[MattusMaximus]

ETA: I've not seen a good critique on the statistics; I suspect that within a certain statistical model they are doing the calculations correctly (or roughly so - some things are odd - in their monte-carlo bit, there's no need to fit a curve there; just perform 100000 runs or whatever). But the real statistical question is how good the model is, as I've tried to say before. If you find some discussion of this, please let me know where!

Thanks for the feedback, Meridian. I'll keep an eye out and let you all know if I come across something.

 

[MattusMaximus]

The social aspects of this affair may be as interesting as the content. I , too found it odd that they went down the route of apparently seeking maximum popular publicity for the results. Simply publishing the paper and informing the physics community would seem to have been enough. The word would surely have reached the people best able to comment fast enough. The comparison with the Pons & Fleischmann affair had also occurred to me .
Is this another case of "sexing up science"?

If it is and it turns out that, as the criticism seems to suggest at this point, they screwed something up, then this could end up being a public-relations disaster for CERN. I certainly hope that isn't the case, though.

We'll see...

 

[sol invictus]

this could end up being a public-relations disaster for CERN.

I'm not sure how much CERN has to do with this. The detector is at Gran Sasso, Italy. The LHC is just used as a neutrino source.

 

[MattusMaximus]

I'm not sure how much CERN has to do with this. The detector is at Gran Sasso, Italy. The LHC is just used as a neutrino source.

True, but when you look at most of the media reports, CERN's name is all over this thing.

 

[Soapy Sam]

I suppose it's a very difficult situation to be in. Even I , a total non-physicist, appreciate how unlikely it is these results are "right" in the sense of violating GR.
To someone like Sol, who does know the details of GR, it's vanishingly improbable. One physicist at Cambridge has promised to eat his boxer shorts on TV if they are right. I presume therefore that the team at CERN / Gran Sasso are equally incredulous, baffled and nervous. I can see why they would seek the input of folk like Sol- but not why they would deliberately publicise the results in a way guaranteed to attract the attention of folk like me and Anders Lindmann. If you secretly suspect you must have screwed up- as most physicists clearly do, why not just quietly ask your friends , colleagues (and yes rivals) to look it over? The paper gives them priority in case they turn out to be right. Is someone after a book deal, too?

 

[Meridian]

I'm not sure how much CERN has to do with this. The detector is at Gran Sasso, Italy. The LHC is just used as a neutrino source.

Well, some (only a few) of the authors list CERN as their affiliation, including the one who uploaded it to arXiv. And I think (from the abstract) that for the precise timing they installed some equipment at CERN that wasn't part of the original experiment.

But yes, it certainly hasn't been endorsed in any way by CERN as a whole. I personally guess that some serious criticism will come from CERN soon!

 

[MattusMaximus]

Well, some (only a few) of the authors list CERN as their affiliation, including the one who uploaded it to arXiv. And I think (from the abstract) that for the precise timing they installed some equipment at CERN that wasn't part of the original experiment.

But yes, it certainly hasn't been endorsed in any way by CERN as a whole. I personally guess that some serious criticism will come from CERN soon!

Yes, this is my suspicion as well. At least, I hope CERN does so.

 

[icerat]

Yes, this is my suspicion as well. At least, I hope CERN does so.

Strictly speaking it's a Gran Sasso study, but official CERN reps are doing interviews and CERN hosted the Q&A -

Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general of CERN, said in an e-mail from Spain, “I agreed to the seminar at CERN because it is the duty of a lab like CERN to give the collaboration the possibility to ask the community for scrutiny of their findings.”

 

[pedrone]

Posted by W. Guglinski as comment (September 24th, 2011 at 5:14 PM ) in Andrea Rossi's blog:
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=510#comments

LHC, matter, antimatter, photon, neutrino, and Quantum Ring Theory​

In september-2011 a team of European scientists has reportedly clocked a flock of subatomic particles called neutrinos moving at just a shade over the speed of light. According to Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, that can’t be, since light, which cruises along at about 186,000 miles per second (299,000 km/sec.), is the only thing that can go that fast.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2094665,00.html#ixzz1YuHT7Dx7

The question is: is Einstein’s theory wrong ?

And the answer is: his theory is incomplete. Let’s see why.

According to QRT, the photon is constituted by a particle and an antiparticle which move in contrary directions with helical trajectory. Because they move in contrary directions, a strong electromagnetic field is created, and it is responsible for the interaction of the photon with matter (the photon interacts with the electric and magnetic fields of matter).

In the page 203 of QRT is proposed the structure of the neutrino: it is formed by positron-electron moving in helical trajectory. The electron gyrates about the positron, and they both gyrate about the line center of the helical trajectory (like the moon gyrate about the earth, and they both gyrate about the sun; as the sun moves in the space, the moon-earth have a helical trajectory in the space).
The electron is tied to the positron through the spin-fusion phenomenon, and so the electron loses its spin (the electron becomes a boson). That’s why the neutrino has spin ½.
In the antineutrino, the positron gyrates about the electron.

As the electron is very close to the positron, their total electric charge is null. And so the neutrino has not any electromagnetic field. That’s why the neutrino does not interact with the matter, because it has no charge, and it has no field.
Therefore the neutrino is not matter, in the sense we know what matter is. Matter is any particle with electric charge and electric and magnetic fields. Matter interacts with matter because of its charge and fields.
So, the neutrino is actually an exotic particle, which does not obey to the rules of matter.

When Einstein developed his Theory of Relativity, he did not have knowledge on the existence of antimatter. He developed his theory from two points of departure: the properties of light and the properties of matter, and so the postulates of relativity are valid for light and matter.

The light has its limit of speed in space thanks to the interaction of the photon (and its helical trajectory) with the aether that fills the space. The matter cannot get the speed of light because its mass increases with the growth of the speed, because of the interaction matter-aether. If a particle of matter would get the speed of light, its mass would become infinite.
But the neutrino does not obey to such rules. As the neutrino is not matter (in the sense we konw the properties of matter), then it is not submitted to the laws of relativity proposed by Einstein.

The speed of a neutrino depends on the condiction in which it was created. Nowadays the Large Hadron Collider is working with half of its capacity, and the neutrinos produced have their speed slightly above the speed of light. When the LHC will start to work with its full capacity, the neutrinos created in the collisions will have a little increase in their speed.

There is need a New Physics. It must be developed from a new point of departure: by considering matter, antimatter, and light. The models and fundamental laws of this New Physics are proposed in my book Quantum Ring Theory.

 

[I Ratant]

Is there an explanation of why this effect is said to be real?
Something in the experiment that pumped those things up so fast?

 

[Soapy Sam]

I think the explanation is clear. Those neutrinos, which should be in free fall, are actually falling faster than gravity (as explained by Einsteins relativity) would predict.
This is because Italy is to the south of Switzerland and because George Bush planted antimatter explosives in the LHC when it was built.



ETA- "This time link between CERN and OPERA was

independently verified by the German Metrology Institute PTB (Physikalisch-Technische​

Bundesanstalt) [22] by taking data at CERN and LNGS with a portable time-transfer device
"
So the time monks are real? The Swiss Watch Industry has outdone itself. Now where can I buy one of these?

 

[SusanB-M1]

No one is going to believe it until it's repeated elsewhere. And even then, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is a very hard experiment to do well.

A likely scenario is that:

1) Some serious criticisms of the result will get aired, perhaps along the lines of the ones we are discussing here, which will give most of the community an excuse to forget about this.

2) The OPERA experiment will try to correct for those critiques, and/or another experiment (Minos for instance) will attempt to replicate the experiment.

3) The effect will go away and be forgotten.

I wouldn't be surprised if that sequence is complete within a year.

If anyone thinks that instead it will be confirmed that neutrinos go faster than light, I've got a large sum of money I'm will to put up for a bet.

Thank you very much for the interesting reply.

 

[Kuko 4000]

I don't know if anyone has posted this yet, but here is an interesting critique (by John Costella, a particle physicist in Melbourne) of the statistical analysis performed by the CERN-OPERA team which seems to cast considerable doubt on their FTL claims.

Mattus, have you noticed the changes he's now done to that article?

Here's the new headline:

Why CERN’s claim for faster-than-light neutrinos is not wrong

Here's the revised abstract:

Two days ago I posted an analysis arguing that the claim of the OPERA group at CERN for having measured faster-than-light neutrinos was based on an incorrect statistical calculation. I have since received an extremely elegant yet simple analysis by David Palmer that demonstrates that I was wrong. In this document I describe in detail the Palmer analysis, which both explicitly refutes one of the assumptions I erroneously made in my analysis, and provides an extremely simple and intuitive way of calculating the statistical significance of the OPERA neutrino experiment, putting it beyond any doubt.

...and conclusion:

The Palmer analysis puts beyond all doubt the statistical significance of the OPERA result. It is extremely elegant, and yields a statistically sound approximation that is simple enough that even high school students can check the calculations. It also allows a rough quantitative estimate of the relative importance of the “end regions” and the “plateau region” in analysing the systematic uncertainties in the OPERA experiment.
The “blunder”, the “embarrassing gaffe”, is mine and mine alone. I am happy to wear that ignominy: the OPERA result—if its estimates for systematic errors withstand scrutiny, and if it is subsequently confirmed in future experiments—would arguably be the most important discovery in physics in almost a century. Looking stupid is a small price to pay if it brings us closer to determining whether such a monumental outcome is real or imaginary.

 

[dlorde]

As an interested bystander, I'm curious to know how many previous experiments have measured neutrino speed, and whether they showed any interesting anomalies. AIUI other experiments have been done on neutrino oscillation - did they manage this assuming the neutrinos were travelling at C, or did they actually confirm it?

If this is a statistical blunder that has escaped all the repeated checks and verifications claimed to have been done, one wonders if that has implications for the less controversial results of other experiments in this field that weren't subject to such scrutiny. Is replication routine for these experiments, always done for the 'interesting' results?

 

[icerat]

As an interested bystander, I'm curious to know how many previous experiments have measured neutrino speed, and whether they showed any interesting anomalies.

Yes, Fermilab reported a similar anomaly in 2007, but it was within the margin of error for their experimental design.

 

[dlorde]

Yes, Fermilab reported a similar anomaly in 2007, but it was within the margin of error for their experimental design.

OK, thanks for that;

 

[SusanB-M1]

.
A full dose of thiotimoline would have had the detector seeing the particles the day before they were transmitted.
The time difference mentioned can only be attributed to the wash of the diluted material.

Love it!

[off topic]there was some senior authority on something to do with farming and animals on Radio 4 the other day - the Farming Programme I think - who, while being interesting on most topics, turned out to be a strong supporter of homeopathic remedies for the animals. She pointed out they were much cheaper, and you could almost hear the other's thoughts - well, of course, they're only water!![/off topic]

 

[I Ratant]

I think the explanation is clear. Those neutrinos, which should be in free fall, are actually falling faster than gravity (as explained by Einsteins relativity) would predict.
This is because Italy is to the south of Switzerland and because George Bush planted antimatter explosives in the LHC when it was built.


ETA- "This time link between CERN and OPERA was

independently verified by the German Metrology Institute PTB (Physikalisch-Technische​

Bundesanstalt) [22] by taking data at CERN and LNGS with a portable time-transfer device
"
So the time monks are real? The Swiss Watch Industry has outdone itself. Now where can I buy one of these?

.
I knew it.
HAARP again.

 

[Tim Thompson]

Superluminal Neutrinos

I have not looked through the many preceding pages, so I hope I am not repetitious. Here are my comments on this result that I posted in another forum, and repeat here for what it's worth:

One should not get too excited about press releases. Better to look here: Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam, submitted to the arXiv server on 22 September 2011 (it's my guess from the format that it will be submitted eventually to Physical Review Letters).

From the paper, a more informative & authoritative source than any press release:

In this paper we report on the precision determination of the neutrino velocity, defined as the ratio of the precisely measured distance from CERN to OPERA to the time of flight of neutrinos traveling through Earth's crust. We used the high-statistics data taken by OPERA in the years 2009, 2020 and 2011. Dedicated upgrades to the timing systems for the time tagging of the CNGS beam at CERN and of the OPERA detector at LNGS resulted in the reduction of the systematic uncertainties down to the level of the statistical error. The measurement also relies on a high-accuracy geodesy campaign that allowed measuring the 730 km CNGS baseline with a precision of 20 cm.

First, it will take light in vacuo about 0.67 nanoseconds to cover 20 cm. So, the 60 nanoseconds time difference cited in the press release, if it stands up to scrutiny of the timing system, represents a significant difference. Timing technology is well developed and can handle 60 nanoseconds with room to spare. So are the techniques of geodesy well developed, and both are well described in the paper (including the effect of earthquakes on the baseline distance). It certainly looks like the authors have gone to much effort to make sure of themselves before making any announcement.

But it is critical to observe that (a) the neutrinos are plowing through 730 km (454 miles) of Earth's crust, and (b) neutrinos are particles with a positive real mass. One would not be surprised to see neutrinos travel through Earth's crust faster than would electromagnetic radiation. However, one should be surprised to see them travel through Earth's crust faster than the speed of light in vacuo. Whether or not this would constitute a violation of special relativity is not at all obvious. Remember some years back, when under special laboratory conditions, laser pulses traveled through special filters, apparently faster than the speed of light in vacuo (e.g., Wang, Kuzmich & Dogariu, 2000). It has also been known for a long time that quantum tunneling can proceed faster than implied by light speed over the same distance (e.g., Hartman, 1962).

The final result reported in the paper is a time difference (neutrinos arriving before light would) of ... 60.7 ± 6.9 (stat) ± 7.4 (sys) nanoseconds, combining low & high energy neutrinos, which are systematically slightly different from each other. Here "stat" is the statistical uncertainty and "sys" is the systematic uncertainty. That's 60.7 ± 14.3 nanoseconds altogether, or anything from 46.4 to 75.0 nanoseconds.

Certainly, if this superluminal propagation speed stands up to scrutiny, it "would be a striking result pointing to new physics in the neutrino sector" (as the paper tells us). A final interpretation of the implications of this result must rely on a detailed understanding of the quantum mechanical interaction between the neutrinos and Earth's crust, especially the possible effect of tunneling.