Update: October 17 00:00 UTC: whether this supposed explanation out of at least 80+ different papers attempting to debunk the neutrino FTL results has a shred of truth will take a while for the physics community to sort out. Regardless, the point of this post was to show that the frontier science journalism/communication falls victim to “viral theories” that have not been adequately tested. In this day and age, anyone with access to a computer and the internet can engage a global audience with their cockamamie ideas on physics or perhaps climate change or medicine. The moral of the story is that with any new discovery which may challenge conventional wisdom is to be patient and keep an open mind. — Ryan Maue.
Not so fast little neutrinos. Turns out that the discovery of superluminal or faster-than-light (FTL) neutrinos at CERN has been “explained”. Before reading the explanation, here’s a tidbit of information that would have probably tipped off a lot of skeptics from the start: to measure the “speed” of the neutrinos from point A to point B, the scientists used our constellation of GPS satellites in earth orbit. Turns out Einstein’s theory of relativity comes in handy to explain those missing 60 nanoseconds over 730 km distance…
I won’t spoil the explanation any further: from an open source Physics journal: Faster-than-Light Neutrino Puzzle Claimed Solved by Special Relativity
— somehow I’m betting the real explanation is still out there…
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Re: Gary Pearse
> Using a constantly moving medium to measure this accurately seems like a poor choice for a very costly infrastructure.
If you could point to 2 points on the Earth, separated by 730,000m, that wouldn’t have seismic, tidal and tectonic effects then let them know. One other thing, one end needs a Super Proton Synchrotron to generate the neutrinos.
> The engineer in me advises that this experiment be repeated about 30 times and the average taken.
The experiment was conducted over a period of 3 years and over 16,000 neutrinos detected with this anomaly.
NW
October 15, 2011 at 5:59 pm
Y’know, if this is the right explanation, it’s major egg on lots of faces at CERN. But top scientists never goof up that big. Right? 😉
###
How is it egg on faces? The scientist collected data that did not make sense, they could not figure out what was wrong, if anything, they asked for verification and alternate explanations. In other words, they acted like scientists.
Gary Pearse says:
60 nanoseconds light travels 1.8m or so (am I right).
No, you’re wrong, in 60ns, light travels 18m
“”””” TomT says:
October 15, 2011 at 7:47 pm
This only explains it if E=MC² , but if the OPERA experiment is right then maybe E≈MC² “””””
Simply not true. E = mc^2, IS true.
No idea what the hell E = MC^2 refers to.
How many times does it need to be said in science; WORDS HAVE MEANING.
And if you change the words, you change the meaning; and that includes the symbols in formulae too.
And the problem with changing words in a science discussion, so as to change the meaning, is that it immediately suggests that you don’t understand the meaning of the words; nor the effect of changing them willy nilly to something else; it suggests you aren’t even aware that the words or correct symbols matter.
Hope this was simply a typo TomT; please be more careful, you never know who is reading your stuff.
George
I don’t believe the problem is a failure to take into account the different inertial reference frames of satellite and ground clocks. Reletivistic effects are routinely accounted for in the GPS receivers. In fact they must be in order to attain accuracy in the centimeters. It’s actually much more involved than that. Local differences in the force of gravity between one satellite’s ground track and another’s are also compensated for as change in the force of gravity of course changes the local space-time curvature and, slight as the difference is, is still enough to introduce relativistic errors. Gravity isn’t however measured “on the fly” so to speak but is rather contained by the instruments in pre-calculated tabular format.
Gary Pearse says:
October 16, 2011 at 11:33 am
am I right
No! One order of magnitude out – I’ll leave it up to you to work out which way.
That would be evidence of what sci-fy calls “hyperspace”. No scientist is going to stick their neck out – that far. Since, I conclude FTL speed is not possible (for the simple reasons stated by Vince Causey above 8:05 am)… Sooner or later, shorter distances through curved space must be considered (after excluding measurement and calculation error). If there is a particle, that can slip through such space – it would be the neutrino/tachyon. Just ask Kirk or Spock. GK
I would be curious as to the corrections for the different rates of the clocks at each location, and how those were accounted for.
Do I think that neutrinos travel faster than light? No. The evidence has to be a lot stronger before I would begin to give credence to this apparent result.
JDN says:
October 16, 2011 at 7:49 am
“It’s easy to figure out whether the clocks at the emitter and detector sites are synchronized.”
=========
The skeptic in me wonders how you can make this statement 🙂
The only way to determine the synchronicity of the clocks, is using light speed, which is the “variable” being measured.
Gosh, conjectures are fun !!
Say, did you guys hear this joke that’s going around Cern?
“The bartender says ‘We don’t serve your kind here’. A neutrino walks into the bar.”
My theory is that this is a glitch in The Matrix.
If you look at standard spacetime diagrams, you find that FTL implies reverse travel in time.
A neutrino backs out of a bar..
This looks like a good approach. Could be applied to cli-sci predictions and make us all rich? http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/neutrinos.png
There is a hypothesis that if Moore’s Law continues to hold true (computing power doubles every couple of years) then as a consequence a point will be reached whereby it will be possible to simulate entire Universes. At this point there will be many simulated Universes, but only one real one so the chances are that you exist only in a simulated Universe. Especially since the simulated Universe can have simulated people in them that simulate their own Universes!
A question then arises as to how can you tell if your existence is just part of a simulated Universe or part of the real Universe. One answer is that simulations are not perfect and as a result they will have bugs in them that can be detected. Bugs such as neutrinos appearing to travel faster than light…..
Note: I think a belief system like this is called simulism
George E. Smith; says:
October 16, 2011 at 1:08 pm
” TomT says:
October 15, 2011 at 7:47 pm
This only explains it if E=MC² , but if the OPERA experiment is right then maybe E≈MC² “””””
Simply not true. E = mc^2, IS true.
No idea what the hell E = MC^2 refers to.
Had me foxed for a bit as well… but if you look closely, it’s not an “=”, but an “≈“.
Post updated.
The adjusted comment you make is
“Regardless, the point of this post was to show that the frontier science journalism/communication falls victim to “viral theories” that have not been adequately tested.”
The real point is there was NO THEORY they released a result which didn’t agree with General Relativity.
In WUWT terms it would be equivalent to releasing a result showing there wasn’t Global Warming.
There were a hell of a lot of CERN scientists not happy about the release and New Scientist carried a story about the angst of a few of them who say the result should not have been released.
The fact is it was released and it was openly discussed and yes there was alot of fruitcakes with whacky theories but the science survived.
To my mind the whole process was how science should work an unpopular result was released openly for discussion … now consider what would happen if this was in climate science …. could it even get published and past the defense team.
Gary Pearse says:
October 16, 2011 at 11:33 am
60 nanoseconds light travels 1.8m or so (am I right).
You are off a decimal. It is 18 meters under discussion, when GPS gives accuracies of 20cms and even 2cm or who knows how much smaller for military use.
My intuition tells me the error hides in the GPS, the number of corrections entering is enormous . It is quite possible that the widespread use of GPS for measurments of earth has redefined the meter. The meter is defined as a specific fraction of the the distance light has covered in vacuum in a second. The GPS is not working in vacuum but its electromagnetic pulses go through the atmosphere and ionosphere and are corrected for that. If a systematic error enters there though, the fact of the precision of measurement with GPS, not disputed, would be a demonstration of the difference between accuracy and precision. It makes no difference for earth transactions if what we call a meter is by 10^-6 off . It matters in measuring the velocity of light. The neutrinos are not affected by matter to have a significant index of refraction, and seem to be covering more “meters” than vacuum meters because the scale is off.
Anna if you are going to comment on physics you perhaps need to read the entire background.
They have checked and rechecked all the obvious stuff … they don’t want to look like idiots. You really think they haven’t checked all that sort of stuff the checklist is on the CERN website if you feel you are some sort of genius.
Nuetrinos are weird and they have a weird effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikheyev%E2%80%93Smirnov%E2%80%93Wolfenstein_effect)
Let the physicists do there job they will find the answer … the first question is to get the result verified by a second laboratory setup until then discussion of the result is pointless.
LdB: I should be more precise: the open-source peer-review system is in its infancy and this particular contribution providing an explanation for the FTL neutrinos has received considerable play in the media. That’s the viral theory I was referring to — and not the original experiment.
Thanks Ryan that makes a hell of a lot more sense to me.
I just thought WUWT should be the last site complaining about release of inconvient experimental results that are not in line with expected science and science defenders would love to silence.
LdB says:
October 16, 2011 at 9:37 pm
Anna if you are going to comment on physics you perhaps need to read the entire background.
This is my weighted opinion. I am an experimentalist, particle physicist, retired to be sure, but still reading up. I listened to the lecture and I read their paper and their checks. They have been very thorough, but they cannot check what might be an insidious systematic bias within their experiment: they depend on the GPS accuracies for their space and time accuracies, and the GPS was not built for measuring the velocity of light. In their table 1 there are large corrections in nanoseconds, from GPS only 350, when they are talking of a 20ns discrepancy. A lot of trust in calculations goes into the GPS, and as I said, nobody doubts it is precise, but whether it is accurate in its meter offer is something that has to be checked by another experiment.
Here is a link that discusses the errors for location by one satellite.
Dangit! This is so disappointing. I was already designing warp engines.
I was hoping they had found a tachyon. Oh well …
The relativistic explanation doesn’t wash. As others have pointed out, GPS takes that into account. The 1 pulse per second time signal is good anywhere on the planet. Short term, it has a lot of jitter, long term, better than 1 nanosecond. My primitive, by CERN standards, rubidium frequency standard has a GPS input. Give it about 6 hours and it synchs up to the nanosecond level, and stays there without jitter (well, at the 10^-11 level) CERN’s cesium standards are far better. Ditto position. One shot measurement can be off as much as 30 meters. Average over time and you get to the centimeter level. 60 nanoseconds? About 18 meters. All well within basic measurement capability. Nanoseconds are easy. When I worked on a project with the folks at NIST a decade ago, they talked attoseconds (10^-18) That’s hard. I assume (dangerous, I know) that the folks at CERN took all the above into account. And they announced it in the proper way: “We found an anomaly. Any ideas?” As opposed to climate scientists “proving that the earth is going to melt unless we get a vast increase in funding.”
Too bad Fermi shut down the Tevatron. Perhaps they could reproduce it.
Anna then you should know better the discrepency is 60ns not 20ns so given you can’t get that fact right excuse me if I take a grain of salt on the rest and doubt your analysis.
All the rebutal papers so far have been debunked and fermilab is gearing up to do a test so we will soon have either confirmation or rebutal rather than some biased speculation.
I wish more of the posters would read the published article before posting their comments.
GPS was not used for the timing. Atomic clocks were used for the timing. Once synchronized, the clocks were periodically checked using GPS to verify their staying in synchronization.
The distance issue is thoroughly discussed in the paper.
And the disparate energy levels of the supernova neutrinos and those in this series of experiments is also an issue.
Come on, folks. Read. There were many experiments, and we read about a compilation of incidents.