DOOOOOOM for physics..are we ?.

www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/22/cern_spots_ftl_neutrinos/


Nice.

We might be going to the stars after all .

I'd bet the discovery channel will have a program on this soon enough if the results are repeatable.

I seen the story break on Newsnight (BBC) last night. The correspondent claimed that the same effect was seen in an experiment a few years ago in the Fermi labs in the US .At the time Fermi ignored the data and put it down to bad data.

If this can be repeated again in experiments then this blows everything we know about the universe out of the water ...unless of course your an avid scifi fan and know that warp power is a fact .

Roll on the future .

If that's going to turn out to be true I will have a serious talk with my physics teacher about those bad marks she wrote me in school

"While the researchers are still advocating “prudence” in the face of these results, they believe their observations – in which the neutrinos made the 730 km journey 60 nanoseconds faster than light would have done – are accurate."

Wow...

The experiments in 2007 were not at Fermilab, they measure neutrinos from the Neutrino Main Injector at Fermilab but are measured at the MINOS detector about 700km or so away. Similarly the work done on the current story was not CERN. The speeds from the MINOS experiment were not 'bad data', however a superluminous claim fell within experimental error (uncertainty of the exact distance iirc). It's also not a matter of 'repeating it again' the results are based of statistical data taken since 2009; they have repeated it about 16000 times.

If the values that OPERA are presenting were correct then we should not have seen the 1987a supernova show up in neutrino detectors. They should have appeared years, and not three hours, before the visible light. We have pretty good evidence that they don't go faster than c. So it'll be interesting to see what's actually going on here.

The preprint of the paper is at arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897

Still, the GPS in my car was still working this morning, so special relativity is doing just fine Which is just as well since GPS is used to measure the length of the OPERA tunnel.

Pesky little neutrinos... I'm going to have to update my neutrino talk yet again!