.

This has gotten delightfully nuts. Reporters who called around to theorists and other kinds of particle and field physicists the last time – nearly  two months ago – found few that took it all that seriously after one team of European physicists said they’d caught neutrinos arriving at the Gran Sasso Lab in an Italian mountain from CERN on the French-Swiss border at an integrated velocity slightly faster than light. Systematic errors blah blah blah. Maybe now the conversations will get REALLY complicated.

The news arose the moment members of the OPERA Collaboration, with 40+ authors on the paper’s title line and another 122 of them in an appendix somewhere, posted their update and apparent confirmation at the arXiv site for breaking (and pre-peer-reviewed) physics type papers. It goes on for 32 pages of data plots, charts, tables, and the occasional equation. It has only 42 footnotes. Naturally. Nobody’s made this observation except their own selves, before, so who you gonna cite? Actually, lots of references to GPS literature. They even looked for some kind of energy dependence in the velocity departure from standard physics. No dice. They asked operators at CERN to make the neutrino bunches really tight, leaving less room for measurement error. Same result.

News coverage is distinct and, of course, non-illuminating which is counter-intuitive or maybe just ironic when the topic is superluminality. I’ll get to it momentarily but am putting it off because there’s so much of it. Skip to it right off, next graf, to evade my personal blather. See the end of our earlier post where you may read my own theory, one made confidently as it is unburdened by actual knowledge. Ignorance, as one sees in politics, breeds boldness of assertion. Knowledge just clutters the mind with maybes, which is why scientists make such disappointing presentations at Congressional hearings. My assertion: Neutrinos GO the right speed, but they are BORN, due to entanglement and extra-dimensionality twinkly wormhole M-brane gobbledy gook, a few meters along their paths from the supposed real birth scene. Sort of out of wedlock, or beam lock, or something. Ergo, one thing to do if this isn’t cleared up quick is to put a detector at some greater distance from CERN, and see if the buggers get there at the same averaged impossible speed, or seem to have settled prudently to one just below that of light.

The illus above comes via BBC, which quickly bundled its previous coverage and capped it with Jason Palmer‘s fresh story. It says in 2d graf “If confirmed by other experiments, the find could undermine one of the basic principles of modern physics.” He also promptly spells out what OPERA stands for, Oscillation Project with Emulsion (T)racking Apparatus. In French or Italian the acronym works better?  Palmer points out that while the tighter bunching of the neutrino bursts reduces some potential sources of error, others remain. The metrology, or measurement of time and space, demands seem high. After all, .00000006 seconds is not a big discrepancy. He has few outside sources commenting, but it’s early. He doesn’t bring up theoft-cited  counter-evidence that neutrinos obey speed limits – they get here from distant supernovas in good sequence with the light waves born in the same maelstrom.

   By the way, with Palmer’s story at BBC, as pointed out to ksjtracker by reader Daniel Griscom, is a photo of a tubelike structure aimed at distant mountains. One believes it to be part of the Gran Sasso highway tunnel administration building. A  confusing  caption says “Neutrinos travel through 700km of rock before reaching Gran Sasso’s underground laboratories.” Yes, but what’s that tube? A pedestrian tunnel, that’s the easy answer. Y’know what I think? It’s a rail gun the Italian military is building, in case the monetary crisis reaches the shooting stage, to fling bundles of worthless Euros labeled “Austerity THIS!” and shot clean over Switzerland and into Germany and its volk looking down their noses to the south at their profligate Latin and Greek co-Continentals.

Other stories:

• NatureNews – Eugenie Samuel Reich: Neutrino experiment replicates faster-than-light finding ; Others not on that long list of authors, says here, remain skeptical,. Many of the authors are probably skeptical too even though many (it says here) had declined to sign the earlier paper. The Gran Sasso team may, in essence, be asking colleagues to please look at this and see if we overlooked something. Reich also names where a replication test, by different people with different hardward, may occur, involving Fermilab near Chicago.
• ScienceInsider – Edwin Cartlidge: Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos: OPERA Confirms and Submits Results, But Unease Remains ; More like reaffirms or reattests than confirms. Cartlidge is perhaps the first to notice that several members of the OPERA collaboration have thus far refused to have their names on either of these reports. Here also is insight into the team’s condition: many are exhausted by the efforts required to run this issue to ground.
• AP – Frank Jordans: CERN excludes 1 error in faster-than-light finding ; Dullest, most accurate hed of the lot. But parse this lede: “The odds have shrunk that Einstein was wrong about a fundamental law of the Universe.” Haven’t they grown that he was wrong? Of course odds are a ratio, maybe they’re still odds if one inverts it. Still, if the odds went from one in a thousand to ten in a thousand he was wrong, they grew.
• Reuters – Kate Kelland: New test finds neutrinos still faster than light ; Nice bit here about one guy who may have to eat his shorts. But also, it’s not correct to say that the new test appeared to confirm a startling finding that neutrinos could “travel fractions of a second faster” than light speed. That gets the sense of things, but seconds are not a measure of velocity. They reached a detector fractions of a second sooner than light speed would permit. The story also mentions that other sources of potential systematic error remain.
• Register (UK) Brid-Aine Parnell: Neutrinos still FASTER THAN LIGHT in second test ;
• Guardian (UK Alok Jha: Neutrinos still faster than light in latest version of experiment ; Quite a smooth job..
• Forbes – Alex Knapp: New Tests Appear to Confirm Claim That Neutrinos Traveled Faster Than Light ; Strong tone of skepticism. Notable also is a story linked to this one, and that Knapp wrote last month, about a possible source of error that I’ve wondered on too. EArth’s gravity field is lumpy, due to inhomogeneous distribution of its mass, and gravity dilates time. So perhaps the different rates of the GPS and other clocks involved, as well as slight variations in the relative pace of time along the path the neutrinos took, have not been properly summed. Nature’s Eugenie Reich has, one learns here, also written on this timing wrinkle.
• MSNBC Cosmic Log  – Alan Boyle : Faster-then-light neutrinos confirmed ; Loose use of the word ‘confirmed,’ but Boyle gets it right: not everyone is convinced. Results have not been repeated by others. So “not refuted” is the meaning.
• The Economist – Still faster than light ; The usual anonymous cleverness from Economist staff, and I learned something. In Britain a furor may be a furore, as in this story’s lede. Not only that, they say it funny: few-ror-ee. This writer also prefers supraluminal to superluminal. Same difference.
• Science 2.0 (blog) Sascha Vongehr: OPERA Confirms Fast Than Light Neutrinos And Indicates Superluminal Small Initial Jumps ; Whoah whoah whoah there. Hmm. I was joking around with wordplay on my personal theory. Now this post declares that one serious thought by people with credentials is that “the neutrinos do not travel with superluminal velocity all the way. They only ‘jump’ a small initial distance shorter than 20 meters..” But then it goes on to say one needs no wormholes, extra dimensions or other fancy dancing short cut. Oh. The author of this blog is, one learns, a physicist.
• Wired – Mark Brown: Faster-than-light neutrino results replicated ;
• … lots more

GRIST for the Mill: OPERA Collaboration ArXiv version 2 of report ;CERN Opera Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

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