Merged Puzzling results from CERN

[CapelDodger]

I suspect the investigation and follow-up experiments happened a lot faster because of all the publicity, but it would certainly have all happened eventually.

In the scientific world, slow and therefore heavy neutrinos would, I think, have attracted just as much attention. Credible results which lie outside a number of established constraints will cause excitement.

 

[quarky]

I wouldn't mind seeing C violated.

Silly bias, I suppose.
So many rules and regulations.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Well, it's hard to compare levels of unexpectedness.

Oh, I dunno.
"Man bites dog" might make it to "The Guardian", but "Naked man bites dog's head off" is pure "Sun".

 

[Anders Lindman]

Any definite conclusion about the faster than light neutrinos yet? I found this:

"At the 25th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto today, CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci presented results on the time of flight of neutrinos from CERN to the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory on behalf of four experiments situated at Gran Sasso. The four, Borexino, ICARUS, LVD and OPERA all measure a neutrino time of flight consistent with the speed of light. This is at odds with a measurement that the OPERA collaboration put up for scrutiny last September, indicating that the original OPERA measurement can be attributed to a faulty element of the experiment’s fibre optic timing system." -- http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2011/PR19.11E.html

Indicating? Sounds too vague to be definite. Has the fiber optic error been confirmed in a more definite way?

 

[Pixel42]

It's been confirmed and the original paper has been corrected.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly

On June 8, 2012 CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci declared on behalf of the four Gran Sasso teams, including OPERA, that the speed of neutrinos is consistent with that of light. The press release, made from the 25th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto, states that the original OPERA results were wrong, due to equipment failures.[8]

On July 12, 2012 OPERA updated their paper by including the new sources of errors in their calculations. They found agreement of neutrino speed with the speed of light.[9]

 

[Anders Lindman]

It's been confirmed and the original paper has been corrected.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly

Oh, Wikipedia, I feel almost embarrassed that I didn't look that up.

This looks definite enough:

"The time stability of LVD compared with that of the OPERA detector gives a time difference between the two classes !t (A – B) = (–73 ± 9) ns. This corresponds to a negative time shift for OPERA in the calendar period from August 2008 to December 2011 of the same order of the excess leading to a neutrino velocity higher than the speed of light as reported by OPERA [7]." -- http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1206/1206.2488.pdf

If I have understood it correctly, what they did was to compare the time for horizontal particles hitting both the LVD (Large Volume Detector) and the OPERA detector at the same time, and the root mean square (kind of like the average) time difference between them was 74 ns, which is definitely in the ballpark of the 60 ns for the faster than light measurements.

 

[Anders Lindman]

I'm a bit disappointed that the faster than light neutrino velocity was a measurement error after all. But there is still a possibility of a conspiracy theory. Because how could CERN publish such extraordinary claim without finding any measurement error like loose cables and wrong clock speeds in circuit boards without it being a psy-op of some kind?