From what I've read, this is based on a misunderstanding of the experiment. The neutrinos were timed with clocks on the ground, synchronized to each other by using the GPS clocks as a common reference. Any error due to the location of the GPS satellites in Earth's gravity well and their relative motion would be essentially identical from both ends of the experiment, only the difference in the error between the two locations would be relevant to synchronization.

So it's still weird? Got it.

We have a new standard of cool in summing up a scientific paper:

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1110/1110.2832.pdf

Money Quote: "Probably not."


Two words, where others jabber for pages and pages. Thumbs up.

This is proof of CERN being bent on world;domination! Beware of green jello, srsly.



No it is not. Subluminal = win.

Apparently Neutrinos are still traveling faster than the speed of light in the latest version of the experiment, though there are still some sources of error to rule out I think.

Brief summary: same basic experiment with a minor tweak, narrower pulses of neutrinos to help exclude any effects of the pulse shape and make sure they're measuring the times accurately. If the effect was a result of a bias in the pulse shape, they should have at least seen a change in the apparent speed.

If they hadn't just shut down Tevatron due to it being "obsolete", we could replicate the experiment there with completely different equipment...there was talk about doing some extra equipment calibration checks and using already-collected data, but I don't know if that ever got anywhere.

OT: Still cannot believe that. Is this creationist sabotage?

Probably not, more likely budget sabotage. The space program is supposedly really popular here in America, but you wouldn't guess that by the money that gets spent on it.

I think part of that is that people here don't know how little gets spent on it.

hi hi

There's lots of people out there that don't understand much of anything about money on large scale projects. I hear people cry and wail about someone wasting a million dollars on some project. I wonder, are they still living in the 50s? There's this thing called inflation that I'm not sure some people even understand.

Well when you hear about a comitee being formed (at the cost of 500 000$) Just to see if a project of 2 millions will be worth it, when everyone with half a brain would see not worth it. what ever this "inflation" thing your call. it will still offend people that good money is wasted on such project.

But on the other hand, is Cern project a private on?

Nope, CERN is an alliance of 20 european countries (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire.), and their annual budget is roundabout 1 billion (tax-)euros, most of it for the LHC.
New toys come extra.

See if one can intervene (or to annoy people), and correct some things (please tell me if this IS too annoying or geeky) . (if someone have a higher ed than I in physics (Ph.D. student or so) please correct me if I'm wrong...)
First: FTL neutrinoes: This result is as far as I gathered only preliminary or test results to see if their toys were working and obviously they were. The problem is time. They wanted to measure the speed the neutrinos had and thus did the classical approach. They have a beam of neutrinos with a known distance. Time is measured by sending a signal saying: "and they leave NOW!" ...rather simple.
Problem: This signal did Not go the same path as the neutrinos, neutrinos went in a straight line from CERN to Italy, whereas the signal went up into space in a GPS satellite, to another satellite and down to Italy, so you can probably sumise the problem here. What they plan to do is to correct for this time difference, basically just add the time it takes for the signal to travel. And ofcourse there are other stuff that could happen to the signal in the atmosphere...
Second: Cold Fusion: A dream, it didn't work the first time, nor the second, third time... don't know how many times they actually tried but not many... this we know why and actually have known since Culomb put up his law of electrostatic forces. It is the exact same REASON (not energies) you won't have a fusion of atoms when you slam your hand in the coffe table (so we should probably be happy about that)...

Foton is correct in my language and Photon is english spelling, but who cares...

Third: Numbers: Imaginary numbers are used in wavefunctions in quantum mechanics to describe electronic states in atoms and molecules and to explain how and why molecules have a certain structure.... and other fancy wavefunctions maybe even in string theory but I wouldn't know that...

For those who actually cared I could try to give a better explanations if you want...

Unless some fool was tapping directly into a GPS ground station, neither facility was sending ANYTHING to the GPS satellites: the number of ground stations is limited, used ONLY to keep the GPS system correctly oriented, and as far as I know send their signals to only the actual satellites.

Thus, both facilities were receiving the timing signals, neither was sending them. Various formulas, however, could theoretically have been miscalculated.

Not quite...they didn't bounce a signal off a GPS satellite. That isn't something anyone does, the only communications sent to GPS satellites are to maintain and manage the GPS network. What they did was synchronize two ground clocks using GPS satellites visible to both sites as a common reference. Then they can just compare timestamps on the data from the accelerator and the neutrino detector.

This should also eliminate most relativistic errors. The GPS satellite's clock might be going fast or slow as seen from the ground, but by an amount that's basically the same at each ground position, and it's only used to keep the clocks in sync with each other. They're still trying to figure out what might be introducing the 60 ns error. (or otherwise explain neutrinos doing something no other particle has been seen doing)

Wikipedia has a quite detailed writeup: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-tha ... no_anomaly

to check their results, i want to see their formulas, the basis of those formulas and the assumptions those calculations each hold.

If there are even a small number of assumptions held within their formulas then we could easily hold such a tiny discrepancy within those gaps.

The easiest solution is easy: we have miscalculated light-speed sufficiently to mess up our results.
If error is less than the normal +- errors held within experiments used to determine light-speed, it's not that hard to be hiding away.

Then go look. The experiment and equipment has been described in great detail. A wide range of experts have been and still are examining their assumptions and looking for any mistakes.




The error is way too big to be something like a mismeasured speed of light. The neutrinos were measured as traveling faster than light by one part in 40000...we commonly accelerate particles to just a few parts per million short of c. Light travels 18 meters in 60 ns, the error in time of flight between two points on the Earth's surface 730 km apart...location results from GPS would be way off. It's one of the easiest answers to come up with, but also one of the easiest to find problems with.

Hmm, thought they sent some timed signal different from the neutrino path, probably read it too fast... Anyhow, I think they did know what the problem was and is working on fixing it. I think it was something to do with the measured travel time of the neutrinos...

The clock on the GPS' go faster if I remember correctly, due to less gravity up there. This is compensated for and calculated (i think) on the satellite using Einsteins theory of relativity (kinda pointless to do the calculations on a small cellphone if you can do it on a supercomputer in space).... I dunno, but the GPS is about using the theory of relativity, which makes it work when traveling anyhow.

It's been on /. for hours and I'm still the first to post it? For shame!

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsid ... Rc.twitter

A new flavor of "runtime error"...

Hardly a surprise. Either everything we know about physics is wrong, or this one experiment had some kind of error. I know which is the more exciting conclusion, but it's not hard to figure out which the more likely conclusion. (Sez Occam's Razor.)

Guess Cern will have to go back to poking around a certain Mad Scientists Phone-Microwave now...

It'd be awesome if it had held up and we'd found something completely revolutionary insofar as physics goes... but as the saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

looks like they really did screw up some where, according to the news just on

I've read it on my national news site. Not in English thus.



Occam's Razor aside, the difference with the speed of light was so minime it had to be a mistake of sorts.