CERN team claims measurement of neutrino speed >c

Creator

Yea; and one more thing :
-- erroneous news always propogates faster than reality. :)

....

alexg

Nothing in the Universe moves faster than rumor.

Zarqon

which is not breaking FTL because rumors on average contain no real information ;)

muhla

Hello falks! Can anybody inform me about last Opera experiment results? More specifically:
-How much energy was spent to run the neutrinos at C? Because according to relativity it needs infinite energy.And two relative questions:1.Can a particle be entirely converted to energy? 2.Does energy always have a carrier particle? Thanks a lot.

Whovian

What do you mean? They can't go at c. Perhaps you mean extremely close to c? In which case one would use the relativistic formula for kinetic energy.

If it annihilates with its antiparticle, yes.

Do you mean that you're wondering if all energy manifests itself as the mass of a particle? I don't think so, due to Special Relativity, but I'm not exactly a reliable source for this sort of stuff, and the Higgs (if it turns out to be an existent particle) would complicate things.

Histspec

The Gran Sasso experiments OPERA, ICARUS, LVD, BOREXINO presented preliminary results of the new neutrino speed measurements in May 2012- they are consistent with the speed of light within margin or errors:

http://francisthemulenews.wordpress....tados-de-2012/ (in Spanish)

Borexino: δt = 2.7 ± 1.2 (stat) ± 3(sys) ns
ICARUS: δt = 5.1 ± 1.1(stat) ± 5.5(sys) ns
LVD: δt = 2.9 ± 0.6(stat) ± 3(sys) ns
OPERA: δt = 1.6 ± 1.1(stat) [+ 6.1, -3.7](sys) ns

OPERA has also revised their 2011 results and will resubmit it to the "Journal of High Energy Physics":
δt = (6.5 ± 7.4 (stat.)+9.2 (sys.)) ns

Also MINOS from Fermilab corrected their former results
δt = −11.4 ± 11.2 (stat) ± 29 (syst) ns (68% C.L)

So Einstein is still laughing...

ZapperZ

The press announcement from CERN on this result can be found here:

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/Press.../PR19.11E.html

Zz.

sshai45

Yet more awards to put into the impressive trophy collection Einstein's theories hold...

StevieTNZ

The latest on Physorg:
http://phys.org/news/2012-06-einstein-neutrino.html

lmoh

Man, I forgot all about this! Hard to believe that it used to one of the big news stories that shook the science world in 2011.

Perhaps somebody should lock this thread up. No sense in beating a dead horse at this point.

lalbatros

Most of the posts could be deleted, if not the whole thread.
After all, it was just an experimental difficulty, and most comments were irrelevant.

TrickyDicky

There's still something I find difficult to understand, the loose wire apparently can account for the 60ns advanced signal but looking at the original long experiment from 2009-2011 and specifically to figure 12 in the original paper, one knows that those 60ns were simply an average and that in fact neutrinos were detected in a range of δt from 1ns to over a hundred nanoseconds (at least that's what I gather, please correct if not the case). So I can't exactly see how a fixed sistematic error can give that dispersion in the detection times. Perhaps someone can shed some light about this.

espen180

I think the most likely explanation is that the signal delay due to the cable was not exactly 60 ns, but some distribution with mean 60 ns or higher and finite variance.

TrickyDicky

Well, maybe so, still it would look to me a excesively "ad hoc" explanation but then I guess the only way to know for sure is repeating the experiment again in similar temporal circumstances to see if that distribution is eliminated.

TrickyDicky

In any case if the loose wire had such a behaviour I'm not sure it would correspond to a sistematic type of error.

espen180

No physical measurements have zero uncertainty. Any attempt to measure the delay of the wire will yield some distribution of delay times.

Drakkith

You want to repeat the experiment with a loose wire just to see if that particular fault was the cause of the errors? There's no reason to. They fixed it and the results immediately showed a change. In any case i doubt one could reproduce the exact amount of "looseness" in the wire the previous experiment had, so I don't know if it could even work.