Superluminal neutrinos: Relativity theory rescued by relativity theory
arXiv's illustration of the experiment and relativistic motion of satellites
As almost everyone suspected it surely would be, the bizarre claim that neutrinos had been clocked traveling faster than the speed of light has been knocked down. Or at least knocked.
Technology Review (disclosure: owned by MIT, the owner of KSJ Tracker) has an unbylined article covering what it calls “the best new ideas” from the pre-publication site Physics arXiv. It reports that a Dutch physicist believes he has found an error in the neutrino measurements at CERN. He says they failed to take into account a difference between the two frames of reference for moving objects–the atomic clocks in orbit and the equipment on the a moving Earth. When the Dutch scientist factored in those differences, they neatly removed the 60 nanoseconds by which the neutrinos seemed to beat lightspeed.
It’s all very complicated, of course, and few are saying the CERN measurements have been knocked flat. The new report is not peer reviewed. Few will buy it until a good, solid review is complete. Maybe that’s why the general interest publications don’t seem to have picked up on this yet. Or maybe there are too few science journalists with the education to judge this. Too bad; it would make a good mystery-solving yarn. Several online specialized sites are not similarly disadvantaged.
Tammy Plotner has an excellent summary, good for the relativity-challenged, at Universe Today.
Phil Plait‘s Bad Astronomy blog at Discover magazine’s site also had a good rundown.
John Farrell, writing in Forbes online, has a tidy account.
If the new challenge is upheld, will it happen so late that traditional news editors deem it “old news” and pass?
-Boyce Rensberger
October 17th, 2011 at 4:25 pm
Boyce: typo alert — while ArXivBlog, which you site, is a blog on Technology Review, the new report is not a blog post, but a paper on the ArXiv.
October 17th, 2011 at 5:28 pm
I’m suspicious of this “relativity warped the GPS times” explanation for a number of reasons, mainly because the GPS system is designed to compensate for a variety of relativity distortions; if it didn’t, it wouldn’t work. Plus, if you read the paper, you’ll find that they verified the synchronization of the two timebases by using a “portable time-transfer device”, as well as two-way timing through a fiber optic link. Difference between the two clocks was less than 3ns.
The Bad Astronomy post you link to has a lot of information on this. Another good post is here:
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2011/10/experimentalists_arent_idiots.php
October 17th, 2011 at 6:03 pm
Thanks, Charles. I’ve edited my post to correct my error.
October 17th, 2011 at 6:23 pm
And thank you, Daniel. No doubt this pot is going to boil for a while longer.
The link you give is to a sensible discussion which makes a point that I should have made but didn’t think of–that most of the blogging on this matter isn’t proper journalism because, among other things, it omits any attempt to get the original CERN group to comment. Instead, these articles are mainly opinionizing and assertion. They omit one of the key elements of good journalism–an effort to verify what is being stated and to seek outside comment.
Which brings me to the question of whether our own blog–the Tracker, I mean–should pay any attention to nonjournalistic blogs. Probably not, not any more than we pay to scientific journals themselves which are not journalism (as we understand it) but which do need to be examined to evaluate the journalism (or lack of it) based on them.
I stand by my original point that this ferment on blogs is a tipoff that there is a good story to be done about how science works to unravel a mystery. We all enjoy a good mystery, don’t we?
I remember the cold fusion flap of 1989 when a lot of us scrambled simultaneously to cast great skepticism on the claims by a Utah group to have discovered that elusive phenomenon while also covering efforts by many legitimate researchers to replicate the experiment. Maybe if the CERN group had done what the Utah group did–call a news conference to announce that they had overturned a major orthodoxy–journalists would be paying more attention to this latest matter.
In retrospect, it’s a good thing the CERN group didn’t claim, flat out, to have overturned relativity.