CERN claims neutrinos went faster than the cosmic speed barrier of 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second)
A neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2040735/So-did-Einstein-wrong-Scientists-clock-particles-travelling-faster-speed-light.html#ixzz1Yjq4R7ii
“The feeling that most people have is this can’t be right, this can’t be real,” said James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, outside the Swiss city of Geneva.
Mr. Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded researchers that they are asking others to independently verify the measurements before claiming an actual discovery.
“They are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they’ve done and really scrutinize it in great detail, and ideally for someone elsewhere in the world to repeat the measurements,” he said Thursday.
Scientists at the competing Fermilab in Chicago have promised to start such work immediately.
“It’s a shock,” said Fermilab head theoretician Stephen Parke, who was not part of the research in Geneva. “It’s going to cause us problems, no doubt about that – if it’s true.”
The Chicago team had similar faster-than-light results in 2007, but those came with a giant margin of error that undercut its scientific significance.
Outside scientists expressed skepticism at CERN’s claim that the neutrinos – one of the strangest well-known particles in physics – were observed smashing past the cosmic speed barrier of 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometres per second).
University of Maryland physics department chairman Drew Baden called it “a flying carpet,” something that was too fantastic to be believable.
CERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometres) away in Italy travelled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant. But given the enormous implications of the find, they still spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there was no flaws in the experiment.
“We have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement,” said Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern, Switzerland, who was involved in the experiment known as OPERA.
The CERN researchers are now looking to the United States and Japan to confirm the results.
A similar neutrino experiment at Fermilab near Chicago would be capable of running the tests, said Stavros Katsanevas, the deputy director of France’s National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research. The institute collaborated with Italy’s Gran Sasso National Laboratory for the experiment at CERN.
Mr. Katsanevas said help could also come from the T2K experiment in Japan, though that is currently on hold after the country’s devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
Scientists agree if the results are confirmed, that it would force a fundamental rethink of the laws of nature.
Einstein’s special relativity theory that says energy equals mass times the speed of light squared underlies “pretty much everything in modern physics,” said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment. “It has worked perfectly up until now.”
He cautioned that the neutrino researchers would have to explain why similar results weren’t detected before, such as when an exploding star – or supernova – was observed in 1987.
“This would be such a sensational discovery if it were true that one has to treat it extremely carefully,” said Mr. Ellis.
Follow Up
OPERA scientists announced the results of the experiment in September 2011 with the stated intent of promoting further inquiry and debate. Later the team reported two flaws in their equipment set-up that had caused errors far outside of their original confidence interval: a fiber optic cable attached improperly, which caused the apparently faster-than-light measurements, and a clock oscillator ticking too fast
wikipedia: Faster-than-light neutrino anomaly
Matt Strassler: What went wrong
Scientific mistakes are forgivable; at the forefront of knowledge, where new techniques are being tried out for the first time, mistakes are going to happen. Some mistakes are worse than others, but even bad ones are going to happen to good people sometimes. The issue here is not the scientific errors themselves, but the bad judgment about how to handle a potentially sensational but probably wrong scientific result.
A neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2040735/So-did-Einstein-wrong-Scientists-clock-particles-travelling-faster-speed-light.html#ixzz1Yjq4R7ii
“The feeling that most people have is this can’t be right, this can’t be real,” said James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, outside the Swiss city of Geneva.
Mr. Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded researchers that they are asking others to independently verify the measurements before claiming an actual discovery.
“They are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they’ve done and really scrutinize it in great detail, and ideally for someone elsewhere in the world to repeat the measurements,” he said Thursday.
Scientists at the competing Fermilab in Chicago have promised to start such work immediately.
“It’s a shock,” said Fermilab head theoretician Stephen Parke, who was not part of the research in Geneva. “It’s going to cause us problems, no doubt about that – if it’s true.”
The Chicago team had similar faster-than-light results in 2007, but those came with a giant margin of error that undercut its scientific significance.
Outside scientists expressed skepticism at CERN’s claim that the neutrinos – one of the strangest well-known particles in physics – were observed smashing past the cosmic speed barrier of 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometres per second).
University of Maryland physics department chairman Drew Baden called it “a flying carpet,” something that was too fantastic to be believable.
CERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometres) away in Italy travelled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant. But given the enormous implications of the find, they still spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there was no flaws in the experiment.
“We have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement,” said Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern, Switzerland, who was involved in the experiment known as OPERA.
The CERN researchers are now looking to the United States and Japan to confirm the results.
A similar neutrino experiment at Fermilab near Chicago would be capable of running the tests, said Stavros Katsanevas, the deputy director of France’s National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research. The institute collaborated with Italy’s Gran Sasso National Laboratory for the experiment at CERN.
Mr. Katsanevas said help could also come from the T2K experiment in Japan, though that is currently on hold after the country’s devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
Scientists agree if the results are confirmed, that it would force a fundamental rethink of the laws of nature.
Einstein’s special relativity theory that says energy equals mass times the speed of light squared underlies “pretty much everything in modern physics,” said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment. “It has worked perfectly up until now.”
He cautioned that the neutrino researchers would have to explain why similar results weren’t detected before, such as when an exploding star – or supernova – was observed in 1987.
“This would be such a sensational discovery if it were true that one has to treat it extremely carefully,” said Mr. Ellis.
Follow Up
OPERA scientists announced the results of the experiment in September 2011 with the stated intent of promoting further inquiry and debate. Later the team reported two flaws in their equipment set-up that had caused errors far outside of their original confidence interval: a fiber optic cable attached improperly, which caused the apparently faster-than-light measurements, and a clock oscillator ticking too fast
wikipedia: Faster-than-light neutrino anomaly
Matt Strassler: What went wrong
Scientific mistakes are forgivable; at the forefront of knowledge, where new techniques are being tried out for the first time, mistakes are going to happen. Some mistakes are worse than others, but even bad ones are going to happen to good people sometimes. The issue here is not the scientific errors themselves, but the bad judgment about how to handle a potentially sensational but probably wrong scientific result.
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