New high-precision tests carried out by the OPERA collaboration in Italy broadly confirm its claim, made in September, to have detected neutrinos travelling at faster than the speed of light. The collaboration today submitted its results to a journal, but some members continue to insist that further checks are needed before the result can be considered sound.
Link: nextbigfuture.com/2011/11/faster-than-light-neutrinos-opera.html
The OPERA Collaboration sent to the Cornell Arxiv an updated version of their preprint today, where they summarize the results of their analysis, expanded with additional statistical tests, and including the check performed with 20 additional neutrino interactions they collected in the last few weeks. These few extra timing measurements crucially allow the ruling out of some potential unaccounted sources of systematic uncertainty, notably ones connected to the knowledge of the proton spill time distribution.
[...]
So what does OPERA find ? Their main result, based on the 15,233 neutrino interactions collected in three years of data taking, is unchanged from the September result. The most interesting part of the new publication is instead that the find that the 20 new neutrino events (where neutrino speeds are individually measured, as opposed to the combined measurement done with the three-year data published in September) confirm the earlier result: the arrival times appear to occur about 60 nanoseconds before they are expected.
Link: science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/opera_confirms_neutrinos_travel_faster_light-84763
Paper: kruel.co/paper-neutrino-velocity-JHEP.pdf
Previously on LW: lesswrong.com/lw/7rc/particles_break_lightspeed_limit/
I was thinking about this earlier today, having read/posted about the original findings and the first papers of "Here are all the ways that the original findings might be incorrect.", and then this announcement this morning.
For simplicity, let's assume someone's initial probabilities are:
There is a 1% chance they were correct.
There is an 11% chance they made a Type A error.
There is an 11% chance they made a Type B error.
There is an 11% chance they made a Type C error.
There is an 11% chance they made a Type D error.
There is an 11% chance they made a Type E error.
There is an 11% chance they made a Type F error.
There is an 11% chance they made a Type G error.
There is an 11% chance they made a Type H error.
There is an 11% chance they made a Type I error.
This paper establishes that there is essentially a negligible chance they made a Type A error. But there are still 8 ways they could be wrong. If I'm doing the calculations correctly, this means they now have about a 1.12% chance of being correct from the perspective of that someone, because these findings also mean it is more likely that they made a Type B-I error as well.
This is a gross simplification of the problem. There are other certainly other possibilities than "Correct" and "9 equally likely types of error." But I think this helped me put the size of the task of proving the neutrinos did go faster than light into a better perspective.
This is (minus the specific numbers, of course, but you too were using them as examples) exactly how I see it.
The most likely error - that of wrong baseline - has not been addressed, so I don't have noticeably improved credence. This is a very small update.