So the BBC is reporting that the results of the neutrino run done most recently by the OPERA experiment is confirming their previous result and continuing to find superluminal neutrino speeds.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236
In this iteration of the experiment OPERA attempted to address, amongst many points, one of their largest sources of uncertainty. Namely, the bunch length of the protons that were being sent from CERN and were producing the neutrinos that they were measuring.
By shortening the bunch widths you have a greater certainty about where the neutrinos are being created and thus you know your initial time to a much higher degree of accuracy.
Needless to say this is a big deal if it is true.
They have updated their paper to include this systematic “fix” as well as complete discussion of various other effects taken into account can be found here on the arxiv.
This is a very exciting find in physics and with the reported plan to submit this paper for review to a journal a final vetting is in due course.
Now we must wait for this experiment to be repeated by the many other long baseline experiments, such as MINOS here at Fermilab and T2K in Japan!
Nice to see an anomalous result that won’t go away. Physics has seemed rather detached from reality recently, at least to us laypeople – one elegant theory after another (spin foams, quantum gravity, CDT, M theory, what-have-you). Not since the universe started to (apparently – see David Wiltshire) accelerate have we had something hard to chew on. At last, another ugly, brute fact!
On the neutrinos track, there might be some particles (or coherent collections of these?) which might absorb a neutrino at one side, while on the other side, in the same time emitting a similar neutrino. Thus we get an illusion of a faster-than-light movement of a neutrino which seemingly “jumped over” another particle with no time…
If so, could the neutrinos run even faster in heavier materials (?like Earth’s core)?
I wrote about this in Physics Forum, too, trying to make it a little bit funny (link added).
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=553526
Dear Mart:
Science is not what we think but we observe. Why are we trying to kill ourselves, make new explanations, make new unfamiliar stories, narrate beautiful sinbad magio to find a way to prove that NO WAY JOSE, neutrinos cannot be faster than c? If Einstein were here, he himself after several OPERA runs would say, HAH! let me refix GR and SR theories to accommodate this new intruder! Let us not waste more time trying to disprove nature making nature believe itself “OH! that is not the way i run, O LORD! I forgot that I run this or the other way” reminding us of Einstein’s “GOD does not play dice with nature”
May be your have become wrinkled, and they need some ironing again, no harm. you could adjust them and do it again.
thanx mark for reading.
fluidic