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/
I'm wondering if in a few decades physical theories won't be talking about how photons move at "99.9% of the speed of neutrinos" (I'm not very knowledgeable about the underlying physical theories and especially about which parts are very solidly established ... from what I understand, our estimate for the speed of light comes from more than just timing photons, and also from some theory, but the epistemology of that is harder to tell for a relative layman like me).
One of the postulates of the (special) theory of relativity is that all laws of nature have the same form in all inertial frames. Electrodynamics predicts a fixed speed for electromagnetic waves, so light must have this speed in all inertial frames. Fixing the speed of light in all inertial frames while maintaining the relativity postulate requires that inertial frames are related by Lorentz transformations. The Lorentz transformations ensure that there can be only one invariant speed, and they also ensure there is no inertial frame moving faster than the ... (read more)