The Last Nail in the Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Coffin Rest easy, folks. Einstein’s legacy and theories are safe. CERN released a statement today reporting that several follow-up experiments have made it clear that last year’s claims of neutrinos being clocked at faster than the speed of light were incorrect (my collected posts on the whole saga).  It wasn’t relativity, or strange physics, or the movement of the Earth’s crust that led to the odd result, either. It was a loose cable. I’m not sure what the fallout will be for people’s trust in science, or science news, or boys crying wolf. People paid attention to something very exciting, and many of us learned something new about physics that we never would have. But part of it was a result of people overblowing overblown overblownalities. A trade-off of integrity and education. I tend to agree with CERN’s Sergio Bertolucci: The story captured the public imagination, and has given people the opportunity to see the scientific method in action – an unexpected result was put up for scrutiny, thoroughly investigated and resolved in part thanks to collaboration between normally competing experiments. That’s how science moves forward. And move forward we will. Just not faster than the speed of light.
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The Last Nail in the Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Coffin

Rest easy, folks. Einstein’s legacy and theories are safe. CERN released a statement today reporting that several follow-up experiments have made it clear that last year’s claims of neutrinos being clocked at faster than the speed of light were incorrect (my collected posts on the whole saga). 

It wasn’t relativity, or strange physics, or the movement of the Earth’s crust that led to the odd result, either. It was a loose cable.

I’m not sure what the fallout will be for people’s trust in science, or science news, or boys crying wolf. People paid attention to something very exciting, and many of us learned something new about physics that we never would have. But part of it was a result of people overblowing overblown overblownalities. A trade-off of integrity and education. I tend to agree with CERN’s Sergio Bertolucci:

The story captured the public imagination, and has given people the opportunity to see the scientific method in action – an unexpected result was put up for scrutiny, thoroughly investigated and resolved in part thanks to collaboration between normally competing experiments. That’s how science moves forward.


And move forward we will. Just not faster than the speed of light.

Superluminal Neutrinos: Cue the Fat Lady . . .

Alas, faster-than-light neutrinos, we barely knew ye …

What started as a paradigm-shaking observation of neutrinos breaking the speed of light might have just become a minor chapter in the history of “Mis-Measurements of Modern Science”.

The ICARUS project at Gran Sasso has made an independent measurement of neutrinos shot from CERN. They were not faster than the speed of light. Rather, they were right on it (or a little slower, if you apply some logic and statistics).

Sean Carroll has more at Cosmic Variance.

Previously: My FTL neutrino posts, trace the saga. Einstein’s safe, for now.

Q:I don't understand how would a loose cable cause this experiment to be wrong? The cable was anticipated to have a 60 nanosecond delay right? If the cable was loose the delay could have been longer say for example 75 nanoseconds. Wouldn't that just mean that the neutrinos traveled faster than previously thought?

whiskeyandritalin

Your logic is correct, but there is a second possible error in the timing equipment that would have the effect of “slowing” the neutrinos down after it’s corrected for.

BBC has more details on the errors. Basically, these sources of error only provide possible ways that the experiment could be off. It will still take replication and analysis by other labs to either nail the coffin shut or pry it open.

FTL Neutrino-no

BREAKING NEWS: GPS Connector Error May Undo Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results

ScienceInsider is reporting (from still unconfirmed sources) that last year’s reports of faster-then-light neutrinos from CERN’s OPERA collaborative were due to a mistake. Specifically, a bad connection between a computer and a GPS unit.

Whoops.

Confused? Here’s a handful of my posts on the subject here and here. That will give you the background on the experiment that you need. For the neutrino particle to have traveled faster than the speed of light, as claimed, it would have thrown some wrenches into very hefty assumptions about modern physics. I was pretty skeptical of this, as were many others, so this being true wouldn’t surprise me.

Keep your eyes open for confirmation on the error. In the meantime, always check your connectors.

UPDATE: More on this from Phil Plait.

Even newer doubts cast on faster-than-light neutrinos experiment Yep, even newer than last weeks supporting evidence! Physicists are poking holes in this ship just as fast as the OPERA team can plug them! Despite last week’s new evidence in support of the faster-than-light (FTL) neutrino observations, a team of competing physicists claim new controversy. The Icarus team, who share the CERN lab that made the original findings, claim that if a neutrino moved faster than light in this experiment, it would have spewed out a ton of energy in the form of electrons and positrons. This is because when something moves faster than light in a medium like air or water (as opposed to a vacuum, like all the “theoretical” speeds assume), it energizes its medium … which you’d be able to detect. It’s related to Cherenkov radiation, which is why nuclear reactors glow blue when they are submerged in water. It works like this: Fission -> Release of Beta Particles -> Faster Than Light Speed In Water -> Water Molecules Energized -> Blue Light Released The Icarus team saw no such energy release from the OPERA experiment (which did not fly through a vacuum) and claims it must be an observational error. Is Icarus flying too close to the Sun? Or is this a valid error? Time will tell. For now, though, the plot thickens, and this guy has promised to eat his boxer shorts on live TV if OPERA holds up. (via The Guardian, image via Fermilab)
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Even newer doubts cast on faster-than-light neutrinos experiment

Yep, even newer than last weeks supporting evidence!

Physicists are poking holes in this ship just as fast as the OPERA team can plug them! Despite last week’s new evidence in support of the faster-than-light (FTL) neutrino observations, a team of competing physicists claim new controversy.

The Icarus team, who share the CERN lab that made the original findings, claim that if a neutrino moved faster than light in this experiment, it would have spewed out a ton of energy in the form of electrons and positrons.

This is because when something moves faster than light in a medium like air or water (as opposed to a vacuum, like all the “theoretical” speeds assume), it energizes its medium … which you’d be able to detect. It’s related to Cherenkov radiation, which is why nuclear reactors glow blue when they are submerged in water. It works like this:

Fission -> Release of Beta Particles -> Faster Than Light Speed In Water -> Water Molecules Energized -> Blue Light Released

The Icarus team saw no such energy release from the OPERA experiment (which did not fly through a vacuum) and claims it must be an observational error.

Is Icarus flying too close to the Sun? Or is this a valid error? Time will tell.

For now, though, the plot thickens, and this guy has promised to eat his boxer shorts on live TV if OPERA holds up.

(via The Guardian, image via Fermilab)

Source: Guardian

Faster-Than-Light Finding Still Holds . . . For Now. What's It All Mean?

A more fine-tuned approach to the faster-than-light neutrino observations from CERN has given strength to the original claim. that subatomic particles can move faster than the speed of light.

Previously, OPERA scientists had clocked neutrinos arriving at a distant detector before the light pulse that accompanied them. This implied that they traveled faster than the speed of light, running contrary to Einstein’s theory of the max speed limit for the universe.

One source of error for that observation was the long pulse time of the neutrino/light source. Essentially, picture a train leaving a station, but I only tell you that it left between 9 and 10 AM. If it arrives at your station at 4 PM, you don’t know if it took 6 hours or 7 hours to get to you, because you don’t have an accurate “time zero”.

By only opening the neutrino/light window for three nanoseconds, the scientists were more sure that the speed they were measuring was accurate. By more accurately knowing when the neutrinos and light left the station, they know more accurately when they arrived.

So far, based on OPERA’s new results, the result holds up (statistically … remember this is all statistics).

Fermilab in Illinois is currently upgrading some equipment in order to try and match this result, which will be the true test of how true it might be. Stay tuned in the coming months.

Faster-than-light neutrino update: What's going on behind the scenes?

The FTL neutrino study was published first on arXiv, which is a unique repository of pre-peer review announcements. So how does that affect how this story has been playing out?

 arXiv isn’t peer reviewed. At least, not ahead of time.

A lot of the time, when you read a newspaper article about a new study in one of those fields, the study hasn’t actually yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. It’s just been posted to arXiv, which sort of becomes a crowd-sourced peer review peer review of its own. Especially for headline-grabbing research making big, bold claims.

That’s the background you need to understand what’s going on right now with the study that claimed to find neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. That announcement was made in an arXiv paper. Putting those results on arXiv was as much a way of saying, “Woah, we just found something crazy, please tell us if you see something we’ve done wrong,” as it was a formal declaration of scientific discovery.

Since that paper was published in September, there have been more than 80 follow-up papers, also published on arXiv, offering criticism of the original research or proposing theoretical explanations of how that seemingly crazy finding could fit into physics as we know it. And all of this is happening before anybody has gone through the peer-review publishing process.

The original research team has been able to gather criticism, find new ideas for checking their work and respond to questions because of this unique open-publishing format. It’s not a substitute for the traditional peer-review process, but I think it allows for stronger and better-reviewed data to make it out of the traditional filters in the end. It’s like a crowd-sourced pre-filter.

Now the CERN folks will take that feedback and repeat some experiments to strengthen or reject their claims. And that work will either make it or not make it into a traditional journal. Time will tell.

I agree with the final conclusion at Boing Boing:

Science benefits when scientists have more than one way to share information with each other.