Particles break light-speed limit?

Kevin

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110922/full/news.2011.554.html

http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897v1

http://usersguidetotheuniverse.com/?p=2169

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3027056

Ereditato says that he is confident enough in the new result to make it public. The researchers claim to have measured the 730-kilometre trip between CERN and its detector to within 20 centimetres. They can measure the time of the trip to within 10 nanoseconds, and they have seen the effect in more than 16,000 events measured over the past two years. Given all this, they believe the result has a significance of six-sigma — the physicists' way of saying it is certainly correct. The group will present their results tomorrow at CERN, and a preprint of their results will be posted on the physics website ArXiv.org.

At least one other experiment has seen a similar effect before, albeit with a much lower confidence level. In 2007, the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment in Minnesota saw neutrinos from the particle-physics facility Fermilab in Illinois arriving slightly ahead of schedule. At the time, the MINOS team downplayed the result, in part because there was too much uncertainty in the detector's exact position to be sure of its significance, says Jenny Thomas, a spokeswoman for the experiment. Thomas says that MINOS was already planning more accurate follow-up experiments before the latest OPERA result. "I'm hoping that we could get that going and make a measurement in a year or two," she says.

Perhaps the end of the era of the light cone and beginning of the era of the neutrino cone? I'd be curious to see your probability estimates for whether this theory pans out. Or other crackpot hypotheses to explain the results.

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110922/full/news.2011.554.html

http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897v1

http://usersguidetotheuniverse.com/?p=2169

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3027056

Ereditato says that he is confident enough in the new result to make it public. The researchers claim to have measured the 730-kilometre trip between CERN and its detector to within 20 centimetres. They can measure the time of the trip to within 10 nanoseconds, and they have seen the effect in more than 16,000 events measured over the past two years. Given all this, they believe the result has a significance of six-sigma — the physicists' way of saying it is certainly correct. The group will present their results tomorrow at CERN, and a preprint of their results will be posted on the physics website ArXiv.org.

At least one other experiment has seen a similar effect before, albeit with a much lower confidence level. In 2007, the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment in Minnesota saw neutrinos from the particle-physics facility Fermilab in Illinois arriving slightly ahead of schedule. At the time, the MINOS team downplayed the result, in part because there was too much uncertainty in the detector's exact position to be sure of its significance, says Jenny Thomas, a spokeswoman for the experiment. Thomas says that MINOS was already planning more accurate follow-up experiments before the latest OPERA result. "I'm hoping that we could get that going and make a measurement in a year or two," she says.

I'm stupid so I shouldn't talk about physics?

You're not stupid, but we're not (as far as I know) qualified to talk about this particular experiment. There's no hope in hell that the particles are going faster than light, so the only interesting discussion is what else could be causing the effect. This would involve an in depth knowledge of particle physics, as well as the details of the experiment, how the speed was calculated, the type of detector being used, etc. I don't work at CERN, and I don't think many LessWrongers do either.

Less Wrong is devoted to discussing exactly this kind of thing.

LessWrong is for discussing rationality not physics. Assigning probabilities to the outcomes stretched my rationalist muscles (I wasn't sure about 10^-8. Too high? Too low?), but that's the only relevance this post has (and yes, I did downvote it).

Do you think the author of the Nature News piece should not have written for fear of causing people to think about a result?

It would be fine to report the anomalous result, and give an interesting exploration of what faster than light particles would imply, making it clear that it's horrendously unlikely. But presenting it as if the particles might actually be going faster than light is misleading.

Instead of shutting down discussion and saying it isn't worth talking about, maybe you should try and expand on "Error caused by some novel physical effect".

I've heard that the detector works by having the neutrinos hit a block where they produce some secondary particles, the results are then inferred from these particles. If these particles are doing something novel, or if the neutrinos are producing an unexpected kind of particle, then this could lead to the errors observed.

EDIT: I'm being too harsh. LessWrongers with less knowledge of the relevant physics would be perfectly justified in assigning a much higher probability to FTL than I do, and they've got no particular reason to update on my belief. Similarly, I expect my probability assignment would change if I learnt more physics.

…even Ereditato says it’s way too early to declare relativity wrong. “I would never say that,” he says. Rather, OPERA researchers are simply presenting a curious result that they cannot explain and asking the community to scrutinize it. “We are forced to say something,” he says. “We could not sweep it under the carpet because that would be dishonest.”

From here.

6khafra15y

I believe I am more skeptical than the average educated person about press releases claiming some fundamental facet of physics is wrong. But I would happily bet $1 against $10,000,000 that they have, indeed, observed neutrinos going faster than the currently understood speed of light.

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Particles break light-speed limit?

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