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Merged Puzzling results from CERN

nvidiot said:
Regarding the 1987 supernova example, was anyone looking for examples of anomalous neutrinos around the time they should have if neutrinos moved this much faster than c?

i.e. You can't find something if you don't know it's there, although I can only imagine someone has gone through their records since this report.
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I don't know. But the point is, they saw neutrinos when they should have and in more or less the amount expected - so at least a significant fraction of the neutrinos released by 1987A travelled at c (or very, very close).
 
Superluminal Neutrinos II

sol invictus said:
It's possible for group velocities to exceed c - there's nothing even slightly exotic or surprising about that. But it is impossible (if SR is correct) for the signal velocity to exceed c.
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That's actually what I was thinking of. Since I am not familiar with the exquisite features of particle physics, I am temporarily free to speculate in unrestrained fashion. I was wondering if what we are seeing could be the group velocity of the neutrinos.

I suspect as well that there will eventually be a flaw uncovered in the statistics. Most neutrino oscillation experiments look frightful from the outside, as huge numbers of "events" are thrown into the trash heap for one reason or the other. If some fraction of the discarded "background" events are really target events, the results can be skewed. That's where I would look for a problem.

But I was impressed with the evident care taken in the paper to get the baseline distance, accounting for the effect of ground motion. It seems to me that what they have done so far was done carefully, so whatever the final result, the people involved deserve at least that much credit; they are not "shooting from the hip" as they say.
 
Tim Thompson said:
But I was impressed with the evident care taken in the paper to get the baseline distance, accounting for the effect of ground motion. It seems to me that what they have done so far was done carefully, so whatever the final result, the people involved deserve at least that much credit; they are not "shooting from the hip" as they say.
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What's missing in the paper is similar evident care (they may have been careful in the background) with the statistics, meaning not just the actual calculation but, perhaps even more importantly, consideration of possible biasing effects. I'd hope to see: possible sources of statistical bias are X, Y, Z, but X contributes at most W (or is negligible) because of blah, etc.
 
Belz... said:
Well, do they have control beams that arrived at precisely the theoretical time ?
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That would require boring a perfectly straight hole under 700 km of mountains, and probably evacuating it to a near-perfect vacuum.

So no.
 
Sol, have you watched the presentation vid and the QA yet? Would be very nice to hear your thoughts on that. In my opinion his attitude towards the questions raised was excellent. Needless to say, I have no expertise to understand the actual content of his answers, but he definitely answered to some of the questions raised on this thread and the other scientists attending the presentation seemed very impressed too.

https://mediastream.cern.ch/MediaArchive/Video/Public/WebLectures/2011/155620/155620-podcast.mp4
 
Wangler said:
Costella has since retracted his initial statistical analysis critique, and has shown that the OPERA result is indeed statistically significant.
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Really?

Thanks for the update!

ETA: Got a link to the retraction?
 
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Wouldn’t the earth’s rotation, and more significantly, our rotation around the sun, affect the apparent trajectory of the neutrino?

I’m talking about rotation rather than linear motion, as this stops us from being in an inertial frame
 
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sol invictus said:
What they probably said is that 1987A does not necessarily conflict with this, because the speed could be energy dependent (or for many other reasons I can think of off the top of my head). That's true - any combination of experimental data can be explained by a sufficiently complicated theory. Nevertheless, the simplest interpretation of OPERA is that neutrinos always travel at 1.00002c, and that is in fact ruled out by 1987A.
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What if there are two packets of neutrinos sent? One superluminal, one subluminal? Perhaps there was a group of neutrinos arriving in 1983, we just weren't watching for them.
 
Would the energy involved in production of superluminal neutrinos be measurable at CERN? Wouldn't this have to be anomalous as well?
 
dasmiller said:
And why would anyone lie about relativistic corrections for GPS?
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Because the Shadow Powers have to keep it a secret that Newton was right! So they can use that knowledge... to... er... well you know. Bankers, and free energy, and stuff like that! :eek:
 
Does anyone know what was the initial purpose of the experiment at CERN? There had been no slightest doubt that neutrino, or a particular flavor of it, could move faster than c, so if CERN really decided to measure the speed of the particle, there had to be a reason. What was that?
 
dlorde said:
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?
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This is an interesting thought.

If something current physicists agreed was possible, like the Higg's Boson, were "demonstrated" by CERN, would there be as much scrutiny and controversy to the results? And as you say, if this experiment did in fact lead to erroneous conclusions, how can we (or at least an ignorant like me) trust any supposed "finds" put forth by CERN?

That said, this doesn't seem to be a Pons-Flieschman sort of event. The folks at CERN who conducted this experiment are skeptical even of their own results and asking others to disprove them. I just hope this is the case when the Higg's is "discovered".
 
epix said:
Does anyone know what was the initial purpose of the experiment at CERN? There had been no slightest doubt that neutrino, or a particular flavor of it, could move faster than c, so if CERN really decided to measure the speed of the particle, there had to be a reason. What was that?
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Errr .. "could _not_ move" ?

Anyway, I'm guessing they found this during the course of neutrino oscillation experiments.
 
Anders Lindman said:
The vacuum energy consists of random fluctuations, but it's there and it can be used as a reference frame.
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No, honestly now, you have absolutely no idea of what you're talking about.

Why are there so many cases of Dunning-Kruger on this site ?

I'm not an expert in physics.
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Understatement of the year 2011.

And yet you continue to say everybody who IS an expert is either wrong on in on some sort of worldwide conspiracy to... bring power to.... someone.

Just as a thought experiment, if a spaceship is traveling 0.3c away from Earth and then a headlight is switched on, then the photons (that travel straight ahead) from that light will have the velocity of 1.3c relative to Earth.
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Again with the discredited Newtonian stuff. Please step into the 19th century, at least !

Just as a thought experiment, if a volcano erupts, then it means that Vulcan is angry or working on some awesome new weapon.
 
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