Faster than light???????

[Guckytos]

Christian,

I have been closely following the "speedy neutrino" case from the day of its first announcement on Fri Sep 29, 2011. See also my CM thread that has 5300 hits meanwhile :
http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewtopic.php?t=416

I did actually attend the announcement talk at CERN, and we still talk almost daily about this experiment among colleagues over lunch. A Prof. colleague of mine and her group being members of the OPERA collaboration, did not sign the first paper on Sep 23 2011, because they were not convinced initially. They signed the final publication, however, that contained many more checks.

This experiment was not easy at all and there is a huge amount of places where something could go wrong without being noticed easily. As the OPERA group emphasized, the announcement on Sep 23 was made because they were stuck after testing and testing for > 6 months after the results had been obtained. They argued that hopefully new ideas/suggestions might come from within the scientific community if they went public...Another reason for going public was that such a sensational rumor will always leak out after a while.

In any case the experiment will be repeated in May, as announced a few days ago by the Director General of CERN ( -> CM). This already indicates that the situation is more complex than: "bug found, experiment wrong, basta!" One reason for a second go is that meanwhile, there is not just one bug, but actually THREE. Two of the three hardware bugs will actually lead to an increase of the neutrino speed while the faulty glas fiber cable decreased it after correction.

Anyway, I don't think that this time the media were guilty in any way. It is rather the potential "earthshaking" implications, if neutrinos were to travel at superluminous speed. In the first few months after the announcement, I counted about 10 incoming papers / day concerned with "speedy neutrinos", mostly by theoretical physicists.

Fridger

Hi Fridger,

I was aware that there was some time between the findings and the announcement, but not that it was 6 months.

Well, okay perhaps I should contain my media critic to the german media. Those at least were mostly written in the "yeah - Sensation" way first and after the thorough chekcs found finally those problems turned out new headlines (and articles) with the very evident tendency "Scientists too dumb to connect cables correctly". But perhaps again there talks my cynical view on modern day mass media.

Anyway, I am very interested in the new experiments and really hope something very interesting turns up. Nothing better than an enigma to get science into gear and then perhaps turn up even more interesting things in the investigations.

[cartrite]

the faulty glas fiber cable decreased it after correction

What was the fault? Fiber connections are rarely loose. I assume that a loose connection would just add a small amount of distance? An exact measurement (approaching 0) of this fiber in question was verified I guess?

[t00fri]

the faulty glas fiber cable decreased it after correction

What was the fault? Fiber connections are rarely loose. I assume that a loose connection would just add a small amount of distance? An exact measurement (approaching 0) of this fiber in question was verified I guess?

Steve,

Here is the "official" formulation by the Director General of CERN, Prof. Rolf Heuer from his mail he sent to scientists at CERN, at my laboratory (DESY) and others:

...
The second (fault) concerns the optical fibre connector that brings
the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock, which may not have been
functioning correctly when the measurements were taken.
...

His complete letter to us you may read over at CM in my "speedy neutrino" thread.

For your information, here is the finalized paper by the OPERA collaboration that contains all details you might want to know about the experimental setup, the electronics etc.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/1109.4897

Fridger

[cartrite]

I'm still looking at this document. It has a lot to learn about.

Every piece of equipment I put in has a gps timing signal. I still can't see why that would be the cause (because of a loose connection?). I guess when experiments require such precession, they must be totally accurate. At least as humanly possible.

cartrite

[PlutonianEmpire]

The one thing I find both highly irritating and depressing about this is that there's so much eye candy out there, and yet there's no way for us to actually get there. In my mind, FTL is pretty much our only ticket to actually getting there, instead of simply gawking at it with a telescope. And yet, the more I learn about what FTL might actually entail, the less appealing it is, so even with FTL, in the end, there's still no way of getting there in the here and now, time dilation and all that jazz.

[cartrite]

The one thing I find both highly irritating and depressing about this is that there's so much eye candy out there, and yet there's no way for us to actually get there. In my mind, FTL is pretty much our only ticket to actually getting there, instead of simply gawking at it with a telescope. And yet, the more I learn about what FTL might actually entail, the less appealing it is, so even with FTL, in the end, there's still no way of getting there in the here and now, time dilation and all that jazz.

O Well Life is a (female dog) and then you die.

But still. Maybe there is something that has not been found out yet. Time will tell. I'll be gone by then though. So I'll stick with my first thought.