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.
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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/
If neutrinos are going back in time (which is only one possible explanation) then you might be able to create some pretty fancy things like Paradox Buttons that cannot be pressed and so won't be and so you can make "wishes" that the universe must satisfy... or the universe can stop you from making the button in the first place. There's a Yudkowsky video about this which he calls the Grandma Extraction Problem. Starts at the 19th minute.
What wrong with hoping for the structure of the universe to be one way rather than another? I do it all the time.
See the Litany of Tarski.