So about that speed of light stuff.

[Lucas]

Watching the webcast: I'm understanding basically nothing, but it's fascinating nonetheless 

[Surlyboi]

So, should we now be looking for a guy from the future coming back to this day trying to destroy the evidence? How does this stuff works exactly?

That would be me. And I've already succeeded. By next week, the great majority of the unwashed masses of humanity will be prattling on about the latest Jersey Shore or whatever shitty equivalent my other associates have come up with in their areas of operation around the globe. The rest of the news will be buried and the parties responsible for this discovery relocated to places better suited for their talents.

YOU ARE NOT READY.

[Ghambit]

Watching the webcast: I'm understanding basically nothing, but it's fascinating nonetheless 

But you can at least understand that pretty much this experiment is (by a factor of at least 10) the most precise measurement of neutrino speed ever in mankind.  It's actually been simmering in Europe since what, 1973??  Waiting for the technology to actually make it happen.

What a beautiful goddamned experiment, even if there ends up being errors. 

I can say most of the crap I learned would be obvious places to look for systematic issues, they have easily accounted for and then some.  He's also defending his findings (the webcast is still going on btw)  against his peers beautifully.

[Lucas]

Absolutely. It was an amazing presentation and among all the technical jargon, I surely grasped how carefully all this was carried on, and also the possible systematic issues (and the conclusions). Nice Q&A session too :)

[Merusk]

So, should we now be looking for a guy from the future coming back to this day trying to destroy the evidence? How does this stuff works exactly?

That would be me. And I've already succeeded. By next week, the great majority of the unwashed masses of humanity will be prattling on about the latest Jersey Shore or whatever shitty equivalent my other associates have come up with in their areas of operation around the globe. The rest of the news will be buried and the parties responsible for this discovery relocated to places better suited for their talents.

YOU ARE NOT READY.

I'd certainly find that more comforting than the notion of American society deciding "The Situation" and that bloated chick were worthy subjects for such exultation.

[Samwise]

[Lucas]

Here's a post about this topic on physicsforums.com, just to show how "orthodox" people can be (but of course with a certain basis, yes). Also funny to read if you like paradoxes and stuff :

http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=532620&page=11

The implications of this experiment are not as relevant as the fact that
the interpretation is incorrect. These neutrinos simply didn't break the
speed of light barrier and as a result any further extrapolation is
unnecessary. The reasoning behind this is as follows:

1. Einstein showed that it cannot be done.

2. A mass containing object that reaches the speed of light stops moving.
If these neutrinos were able to exceed the speed of light then they
would not have reached the target facility and therefore could not be
observed in order to have their speed measured.

3. Transmogrification of sub-atomic particles is impossible. If the
neutrinos that are being sent from CERN are not the same sub-atomic
particles being observed at the target facility, then they are
measuring the speed of different objects.

4. As the observers affect the observation, since there are two different
facilities in the experiment, each with different observers, the
observer's speed of light at the CERN facility is different to the
observer's speed of light at the target facility and therefore the
difference in these speeds of light will affect the experiment.

[pxib]

Yeah, I especially like number four... relativistic simultaneity is a harsh mistress.

My favorite fact about neutrinos:

In order to be 99% certain you'll stop a gamma ray, an extremely high energy photon, you'd need a wall of lead ten centimeters thick.

In order to be 99% certain you'll stop a neutrino, a very weakly interactive particle, you'd need a wall of lead FIFTY LIGHT YEARS THICK.

[luckton]

Most of the physics community right now...

[Ghambit]

It's funny how these physics guys dont like to talk about the theoretical.  They remind me more of engineers than physicists actually, which delves into that age-old fight between cosmologists and particle physicists.  Instead of using this data to promote a thought experiment that Einstein would've appreciated, they use Einstein to simply stop the chatter altogether.  Kinda maddening.

I have yet to see a single quantitative theoretical post from the whole of the physicsforum on this.  You either play by their rules or are shunned.

[Mosesandstick]

Quantitative or qualitative?

[Ghambit]

Quantitative or qualitative?

Either.  And actually, in that place prepare to be ignored if you go the qualitative route.

[Margalis]

Obviously this is bogus, established science never turns out to be at least partially incorrect.

[Comstar]

Maybe this is what it felt like when it was announced that Light travelled at the same speed no matter what your position. Couple of years later the universe gets turned upside down.

[NowhereMan]

It's funny how these physics guys dont like to talk about the theoretical.  They remind me more of engineers than physicists actually, which delves into that age-old fight between cosmologists and particle physicists.  Instead of using this data to promote a thought experiment that Einstein would've appreciated, they use Einstein to simply stop the chatter altogether.  Kinda maddening.

I have yet to see a single quantitative theoretical post from the whole of the physicsforum on this.  You either play by their rules or are shunned.

Oh hey Mr. Feyerabend. Honestly this is one of those times when that paradigm view of science comes to the fore, an experiment that threatens to wholly undermine the existing dominant paradigm will generally get exceptioned and coopted to the greatest extent that it can into the existing paradigm. If it genuinely can't, typically it'll get taken up by a few present scientists and the following generations but you really can't expect those already in the fields and fully immersed in the present paradigm to throw it all out the window (as far as they're concerned). It's one of those moments when the practice and general idea of how science runs can separate quite visibly.

On the other hand 99% of the time these sort of experiments don't really require shifting to a new scientific paradigm and science wouldn't get a lot done if people started throwing away theories and models the minute something suggested that they didn't work.

[ajax34i]

They've probably done this already, since they've published their results, but personally I'd be looking for computer clock and synchronization issues.  Everything is measured by computers, and they are 700+ km apart, and 10 ns seems to be in the realm of several clock cycles.

Step 2, of course, would be to shoot the neutrinos at the detectors in Japan and see if the increase in distance results in a correspondingly higher time discrepancy.  Though, again, computer clocks not being synchronized can be dependent on the distance too.

[Ghambit]

It's funny how these physics guys dont like to talk about the theoretical.  They remind me more of engineers than physicists actually, which delves into that age-old fight between cosmologists and particle physicists.  Instead of using this data to promote a thought experiment that Einstein would've appreciated, they use Einstein to simply stop the chatter altogether.  Kinda maddening.

I have yet to see a single quantitative theoretical post from the whole of the physicsforum on this.  You either play by their rules or are shunned.

On the other hand 99% of the time these sort of experiments don't really require shifting to a new scientific paradigm and science wouldn't get a lot done if people started throwing away theories and models the minute something suggested that they didn't work.

It's the classic dork-model of social interaction when you take part in physicsforums threads such as this.  That is, it's self-defeating.   
Literally, any jackass knows only OPERA has access to every slice of data, yet the forum rules require no speculation and no theoreticals in the thread. ummmm, ok.
So basically, the thread is full of people either:

a)  getting yelled at by the moderator for being too theoretical
b)  just flat out ignoring the experiment altogether and knowitall debating the experimental physics that were already explained in the paper and seminar

Everyone loves the mathy person in "b" with his smooth recitation of interesting/complex facts.  But, I guess nevermind the fact he failed to actually pay fucking attention to the details of the experiment.  Meaning, I just wasted 5 minutes reading your opposition to something that never occured.

Moral of story?  Particle Physicists aren't as smart as they seem to be.

[Khaldun]

It sort does have to be an error of some kind, though. Otherwise we'd already have had some observations of the phenomenon, because over long scales it's a really significant difference. We'd be seeing neutrinos arriving in bursts months or years before we saw everything else from supernova.

Unless there's something very, very particular about the type of neutrinos, circumstances of travel and observation, etc., that's reproducible that wouldn't normally pertain from natural sources of neutrino emissions?

[Simond]

If "some neutrinos do actually travel faster than light" is actually how the universe work, how would people know to look for tachyonic neutrino bursts? By the time the light from whatever source caused the burst hit Earth, the neutrinos would have already been and gone.

[Ghambit]

If "some neutrinos do actually travel faster than light" is actually how the universe work, how would people know to look for tachyonic neutrino bursts? By the time the light from whatever source caused the burst hit Earth, the neutrinos would have already been and gone.

There are a few experiments going on right now trying to find the elusive naturally occuring high energy neutrino.  I dont believe they have yet.   And it's possible they only exist fleetingly (say just before exiting a sun's corona).  Which means we wont see them.

And it's almost more important to actually follow the path of a LOW energy neutrino, which we've not been able to do at all.  All we do is detect them... no one knows wtf they do enroute.

I suggested devising an experiment that'd be able to tag and track low-energy neutrinos, but of course was shot down.  Neutrinos are the only known perfectly "directional" partcile in nature.  That is, they travel in straight lines no matter what's in the way.  This means theoretically you should be able to statistically isolate some and measure their travel times.  (shrug)  But wtf do I know, I'm just lamestream I guess.   

Funny thing is, science NEEDS this particle to give an excuse to expand the physics.  Our current physics flat out doesn't universally work.  If OPERA is the first evidence of Hyperspace, this is a good thing.

[Khaldun]

Until the Great Old Ones come through the breach in space-time.

[pxib]

I suggested devising an experiment that'd be able to tag and track low-energy neutrinos, but of course was shot down.  Neutrinos are the only known perfectly "directional" partcile in nature.  That is, they travel in straight lines no matter what's in the way.  This means theoretically you should be able to statistically isolate some and measure their travel times.  (shrug)  But wtf do I know, I'm just lamestream I guess.   

On average, at any given instant in every cubic meter of space in the universe there are about 330 million "low energy neutrinos". Near a star, the density is a bit thicker: On Earth, for example, about 40 billion neutrinos pass through any given cubic centimeter every second. In order to be 99% certain of stopping any particular one you need a wall of lead 50 light years thick. Even a monatomic "wall" that thick would contain more atoms of lead than exist in the universe. Detecting a specific individual neutrino is more or less equally difficult. To say these things are difficult to affect is a phenomenal understatement.

The fact that OPERA found a way to distinguish their burst of neutrinos from the background flood is a major scientific achievement on the bleeding edge of experimental physics. There are not currently any easy, straightforward answers for how to improve their technique.

[Ghambit]

Well, their technique wasnt really new (it's been done in the past) nor complex.  All they did was create GeV (high energy) neutrinos instead of MeV ones.  That way, they only needed to detect GeV neutrinos.  Since there are no naturally occuring GeV neutrinos (that make it to earth anyways; it's possible they do exist though) they obviously knew how to find them. 

My idea was to use a directional variable to isolate and tag neutrinos. e.g. only detect neutrinos that have followed "x" path for a certain amount of time.  This would be a small detector obviously.  The smaller the better.  The idea is to limit the frame as much as possible.

[MahrinSkel]

How the heck do you do that?  Unless you could get a beam strong enough or detector sensitive enough to give you a "smoke trail" ala a laser illuminating a mist, you have no way to determines directionality.  Even with this experiment they needed thousands of events to be sure they were detecting their GeV manufactured neutrinos and not natural background.

The theory that seemed most interesting was that the neutrinos were tunneling through matter nuclei, that when they hit one side of a nucleus they warped/jumped/were re-emitted instantly on the other side.

--Dave

[Lantyssa]

My idea was to use a directional variable to isolate and tag neutrinos. e.g. only detect neutrinos that have followed "x" path for a certain amount of time.  This would be a small detector obviously.  The smaller the better.  The idea is to limit the frame as much as possible.

You cannot choose what to detect.  Either a particle passes through a detector or it doesn't.

You cannot even be certain it is your particle unless you repeat the experiment thousands of times (then any given particle is statistically yours) or you have a series of detectors set up and and can watch the trail light up as it passes through them sequentially.

If this is a true result and not a miscalibration, then tunneling makes the most logical lay-sense.  (This is particle physics.  What we think of logic doesn't have to apply.)  But if nutrinos tunnel through any nucleus they encounter, that would explain why they're so hard to stop.  But it also poses an interesting conundrum if this is the case.  In pure vacuum they do travel at the speed of light.  When they encounter dense matter, they speed up.

What if gravity is just an attempt by matter to tunnel through other nearby matter, but it really only works well for the smallest and highest energy particles?

[Samwise]

[Arthur_Parker]

The most likely explanation when someone finishes a race faster than you think possible is that they cheated.  It's not as far as they thought or there's another measurement error somewhere, I'm surprised people are taking this so seriously.

[Ghambit]

It's not that we take it seriously, but that it gives us something tangible to formulate a thought experiment over.  Also, neutrinos are scientifically very mysterious right now and your taxpayer dollars have gone to the tune of many many billions into just that one damned particle.  So regarding the media, I'd suggest we cut them some slack since that's pretty much what's funding this shit to begin with.

Speaking of which (gravity probe B, et. al), the only relativistic phenomenon they didnt account for was frame-dragging.  So that's another possibility now as well.  They'd have to calculate it for earth rotation and orbit around the sun.

As for my semi-psychotic low energy neutrino radar gun invention, I'd need to doodle some stuff and post it to be clear about it.  I'm lazy though.

[Tannhauser]

I'm too dumb to grok the details about all of this, but if science dismisses it out of hand because it doesn't meet established doctrine, how is science different from religion?

[apocrypha]

I'm too dumb to grok the details about all of this, but if science dismisses it out of hand because it doesn't meet established doctrine, how is science different from religion?

Because while some may dismiss it, many others will try to actually test it. Attempting to disprove religion undermines the concept of faith, upon which it is based. Attempting to disprove science is what makes science work.

[MahrinSkel]

And if they actually do prove out and undermine the Standard Model (or at least make it require some fundamental revision) the overall physics community will genuinely try to find the parameters of it with new experiments, rather than just declare it heresy and anathema on anyone who pursues it.

--Dave

[pxib]

Relativity isn't doctrine, it's just a theory that has failed to be proven wrong after thousands upon thousands of tests. No experiment yet devised has found a hole in it. William of Ockham posits that something we don't understand is more likely to be a simple fact we forgot to consider rather than some new mystery we haven't even guessed. "Simple" is a relative term, of course, so in the case of neutrinos the obvious thing we're missing might be well understood by only a handful of people. The OPERA team wanted to make sure those people would take a look at their methodology and results.

If a coin comes up heads thirty times in a row, what are the odds that it will come up heads again? There are two popular wrong answers: The hopeless rube says "It's just GOTTA come up tails this time," and the educated rube says "50%."

Science figures that the odds of getting 30 flips in a row is less than one in a billion, and says "Let me see the other side of that coin."

[bhodi]

There's a good Feynman lecture in the book The Character of Physical Law where he explains that in general, things aren't randomly proven wrong just because you have more sensitive instruments. Generally what happens is that you end up testing really small or really big and don't get the answers you expect. The unexpectedness is generally on one end of the scale or the other. The example he used was speed, newton works all up until you start going really fast, and then the entire thing breaks down. We didn't have the capability to measure that a few hundred years ago and so never saw the error.

[Sand]

So has this mystery been solved yet? Have we achieved warp speed or what?

[Nebu]

So has this mystery been solved yet? Have we achieved warp speed or what?

I traveled to the future and got the answer, but I'm not telling.  Oh, I also won the powerball... again.