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neopolitan said:Could the measurement process have affected the measurement? (That is, are we looking at a sort of Heisenberg effect, where our observation of the neutrinos is somehow affecting timing in a way that we haven't figured out?)
neopolitan
I believe neopolitan has brought up an interesting point that has not been discussed in full. What are the scientists claiming? That they have measured neutrinos traveling faster than c. Here's the essential point. What speed? An average speed or an instantaneous speed?
Newton showed us centuries ago that average speed and instantaneous speed are not necessarily the same. They are the same if we assume a priori that the instantaneous speed is the same at every point on the path of travel of an object's speed we are measuring.
To claim a neutrino is traveling faster than a photon we would have to take an instananeous velocity measurment of that neutrino. An instantaneous velocity measurement would require an infinitesimally small distance between two clocks -- essentially a point.
Now, enter the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The neutrino's dimensions are in the realm of quantum physics, and so it must conform to HUP. If there were a way that we could absolutely measure this "point", the infinitesimally small distance between the two clocks, we could not by HUP precisely determine the momentum of that neutrino at that point, or the velocity at that point. HUP forbids it.
This being the case, it wouldn't matter if the experiment could eliminate all systemic measurement errors, there still would be an inescapable uncertainty in the instantaneous speed of the neutrino.
One might argue, an instantaneous velocity measurement is not being measured in this experiment, and so HUP doesn't apply. Well, this would assume an average velocity is being measured then.
However, if you sliced the path of travel of the neutrino into an infinite number of infinitesimally small increments, each slice would have an inescabable uncertainty in measuring the instantaneous velocity of the neutrino.
Add all these uncertainties up. Could we then claim we have an absolute certain measurment of average velocity of the neutrino for the distance between Cern and Gran Sasson, even though we could never attain a certain measurement of the neutrino's instantaneous velocity at every point along its path between Cern and Gran Sasson?
It seems like a paradoxical contradiction.