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.

The comparison to parapsychology is a really poor one in this case-- for what should be pretty obvious reasons.

Well, whatever this might say about me, the reasons aren't obvious to me.

For example, we know there is no file drawer effect.

Right, but as I understand it, you don't need a file drawer effect to see that some of the experiments done in parapsychology still have devastatingly tiny p-values on their own, such as through the Stanford Research Institute.. So the file drawer effect isn't really the right way to challenge the analogy.

But more importantly this was a six sigma deviation from theoretical prediction. As far as I know, that is unheard of in parapsychology.

I actually don't know what that means. Is sigma being used to indicate standard deviation? If so, then yes, there have been a number of parapsychology experiments that went in that range of accuracy - some moreso if I recall correctly. (It has been many years since I read into that stuff, so I could be misremembering.)

We cannot treat physics the way we treat psychology.

My point is actually more about statistics than science, so any system that uses frequentist statistics to extract truth is going to suffer from this kind of comparison. As I understand it, the statistical methods that are used to verify measurements like this FTL neutrino phenomenon are the same kinds of techniques used to demonstrate that people can psychokinetically affect random-number generators. So either parapsychology is ridiculous because it uses bad statistical methods (in which case there's a significant chance that this FTL finding is a statistical error), or we can trust the statistical methods that CERN used (which seems to force us to trust the statistical methods that parapsychologists use.)

(Disclaimer: I'm not trying to argue anything about parapsychology here. I'm only attempting to point out that, best as I can tell, the argument for parapsychology as the control group for science seems to suggest that the CERN results stand a fair chance of being bad statistics in action. If A implies B and we're asserting probably-not-B, then we have to accept probably-not-A.)

Right, but as I understand it, you don't need a file drawer effect to see that some of the experiments done in parapsychology still have devastatingly tiny p-values on their own, such as through the Stanford Research Institute.. So the file drawer effect isn't really the right way to challenge the analogy.

How is that?

I actually don't know what that means. Is sigma being used to indicate standard deviation? If so, then yes, there have been a number of parapsychology experiments that went in that range of accuracy - some moreso if I recall correctly. (

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