The OPERA collaboration, which made headlines in September with the revolutionary claim to have clocked neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light, has identified two possible sources of error in its experiment. If true, its result would have violated Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, a cornerstone of modern physics.
OPERA had collected data suggesting that neutrinos generated at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, and sent 730 kilometres to its detector at Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy were arriving 60 nanoseconds faster than a light beam would take to travel the same distance. Many physicists were skeptical but the measurement seemed to have been done carefully and reached a statistically significant level.
But according to a statement OPERA began circulating today, two possible problems have now been found with its set-up. As many physicists had speculated might be the case, both are related to the experiment’s pioneering use of Global Positioning System (GPS) signals to synchronize atomic clocks at each end of its neutrino beam. First, the passage of time on the clocks between the arrival of the synchronizing signal has to be interpolated, and OPERA now says that this may not have been done correctly. Second, there was a possible faulty connection between the GPS signal and the OPERA master clock.
An anonymously sourced account on Science Insider today broke the news that OPERA may have made a mistake. That report says that the faulty connection can account exactly for the 60-nanosecond effect. OPERA’s official statement stops short of that, saying instead that its two possible sources of error point in opposite directions and it is still working things out. Its statement reads, in full:
The OPERA Collaboration, by continuing its campaign of verifications on the neutrino velocity measurement, has identified two issues that could significantly affect the reported result. The first one is linked to the oscillator used to produce the events time-stamps in between the GPS synchronizations. The second point is related to the connection of the optical fiber bringing the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock.
These two issues can modify the neutrino time of flight in opposite directions. While continuing our investigations, in order to unambiguously quantify the effect on the observed result, the Collaboration is looking forward to performing a new measurement of the neutrino velocity as soon as a new bunched beam will be available in 2012. An extensive report on the above mentioned verifications and results will be shortly made available to the scientific committees and agencies.
Caren Hagner, a member of OPERA at the University of Hamburg in Germany, says: “For the moment the collaboration decided not to make a quantitative statement, because we have to recheck and discuss the findings more thoroughly.”
At Fermilab, members of the MINOS collaboration (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) continue to try to make their own independent measurement of the speed of neutrinos, with initial results expected later this year.
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Not likely that either of these “two possible errors” will resolve the matter. GPS itself is where the flaw is.
https://physicsnext.org has been saying for over a month: OPERA Experiment and its flawed GPS Measurements cause neutrinos to appear superluminal. Speed = Distance / Time. If measured this way the neutrinos will not be faster than light, provided Distance and Time can be correctly measured. But OPERA used the latest technology – GPS, which adjusts time according to relativity’s equations. Such adjustments are erroneous (details below). (Site also links to a fun must-read New York Times story about GPS).
So in OPERA’s physics, Speed = (GPS Measured Distance) / (GPS Measured Time). You can get neutrinos back under light speed if you can eliminate GPS from the measurements. Relativity-worshipping physicists can (and probably will) escape the faster-than-light neutrinos dilemma by dodging GPS and thus dodging relativistic time equations. So relativity-worshippers may well have the last laugh. But look at the irony – they have to escape from relativity’s GPS time adjustments to fix the neutrino issue and save relativity’s light postulate!
But they would have this rhyme back again – “If nothing travels faster than light then Einstein’s theory is right!” Mediocre minds (i.e. just about everyone in today’s world of physics) would then again dance to the line, ignoring the detail that relativity’s time equations caused the problem. Truly, a dance of the non-thinking crowd!
Reality is more complex: Einstein’s Postulates are Correct but Einstein’s equations (derived from postulates) are WRONG, and correct equations are in paper at https://physicsnext.org! So GPS makes adjustments based on wrong equations. (If special relativity’s equations are wrong then general relativity, of course, is history too!)
A COUNTER-EXAMPLE exists that PROVES that (though Einstein’s postulates are correct), Einstein’s claim of having derived the Lorentz transformations is wrong, yes a COUNTER-EXAMPLE — and at least one Nobel Prize winner takes this realization seriously. See paper at https://physicsnext.org/ for details, a very simple read, but majority be warned… facing physics reality regarding the foundations could disturb a mediocre mind and make you react emotionally…for example, Howard Georgi got very angry!
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I’m just a layperson but I and others can claim precedence over your pysicsnext.org reference. The following comment was posted Wednesday, December 28, 2011, 11:55:07 to: https://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/09/neutrinos-travel-faster-than-lig.html
There is a more fundamental problem than even relying on GPS and standard geodesy routines to estimate distance traversed, since actual path and therefore actual traversal distance are indeterminable.
James T. Dwyer
The fundamental problem with these experiments is that no matter how accurately they might measure the relative emission and detection times of detected neutrinos, the distance traversed cannot be definitively or precisely determined. As a result, any speed assessment is at best an estimate.
While the experiments presume a linear distance between GPS coordinates of CERN and Gran Sasso, as determined by standard geodesy routines, there is ample reason to expect that the undetected actual path traversed by neutrinos is subject to relativistic effects that have not been accounted for. Please see: Wolfgang Kundt, (2011). “Speed of the CERN Neutrinos released on 22.9.2011 – Was stated superluminality due to neglecting General Relativity?”,
https://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3888v1
The estimated discrepancy of 61 ns between the calculated speed of light in a vacuum over the estimated 731,278+/-0.2 meters and the now reasonably measured neutrino ‘time-of-flight’ is equivalent to a distance discrepancy of 18 meters. If, for any reason, the distance traversed by neutrinos was overestimated by about 18 meters then the detected neutrinos DID NOT exceed the speed of light.
IMO, If we were to set up a massive neutrino detector facility on the moon (accounting for a much larger dispersion angle) perhaps we could obtain reliably conclusive timing results for detected neutrinos, since the precise distance to the moon can be experimentally confirmed through laser reflection. In that case, the path taken by neutrinos would be more likely the same as photons over the greater linear distance.
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the fact is neutrino moves in space only and not in space-time
if he is faster than c we can postulate he does not move at all
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The result of the “CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso” (CNGS) experiment really challenges Einstein’s Special Relativity Theory, but not because neutrinos’ velocity was faster than Einstein’s universal constant . It is possible to show that the neutrinos move with velocity and that the 60 ns discrepancy of the CNGS calculation is removed when we apply formulae of the Complementary Special Relativity Theory (CSRT) [Valent, Pavol. (2007) Complementary Special Relativity Theory and Some of Its Applications. The New and Old Concepts of Physics, Volume 4, No. 4/ 2007, 609-631,Versita. DOI: 10.2478/v10005-007-0027-6.] to the process of the GPS distance measurement and clocks synchronization.
The method of CNGS distance measurement and subsequent clock synchronizations fail because they rely on using Einstein’s SRT principles, namely that the one-way speed of light
is . To prove that the one-way speed of light goes by the CSRT postulate and not by Einstein’s, would be easy, if CNGS or MINOS change the software in the GPS receivers in the sense of the CSRT, or if they change the course of the single GPS satellite used during synchronisation clock in CERN and Gran Sasso, respectively.
Scientific community desires that the CERN, OPERA and MINOS staffs would be bold once again, and not to give up under the pressure of scientific conservatives. They sure realize that their scientific privilege is not looking for such alternative culprits as a “wrong cable” and so on. Nobody can stop revolution when it comes in right time.
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In dense aether model the neutrinos (Falaco solitons of longitudinal waves) have a good reason for being slightly superluminal in the same way, like the photons (a Russel’s solitons of transverse waves) have a good reason to be subluminal, at least in certain, IMO quite wide range of energies. IMO the acceptation of most phenomena, which don’t play well with mainstream physics follow the very evolution, similar to wake wave (or dark matter around massive bodies): after brief period of medial noise they’re refused and slowly re-accepted again, actually the more slowly, the more controversial they are. The cold fusion is a typical example, but we have many other similar findings (room temperature superconductivity of J.F.Prins, antigravity of Podkletnov or gravitomagnetism of Tajmar). It means, I’m convinced, that superluminal neutrino concept is relevant – but the social pressure for their refusal is currently stronger, than their observational evidence. The existence of premature reports like this one, which advance the official channels for information spreading serves as an analogy for superluminal neutrino motion.
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The “speed of light” is measured in two different ways. One way is by using atomic clocks to see how much time it takes for light to travel a known distance. The other way is to measure the electric and magnetic universal constants and calculate from them the theoretical speed of light. The closeness of these two determinations of the speed of light give assurance that physics theory is valid.
Because it is not possible to take measurements perfectly, there is some statistical uncertainty about exactly how fast is the speed of light.
I wish to here propose a hypothesis: That the measured speed of light, even in vacuum, will always be slightly slower than the “speed of light” needed by special relativity. The intuition that suggests this hypothesis to me is: If measured speed of light were exactly the speed of light need by special relativity,
then the light would experience exactly zero time between emission and reception. This seems absurd to me. Surely, light must experience some tiny bit of time in which to wave, else, how could it travel?
Kermit Rose