Neutrinos caught speeding at CERN??

[ngcles]

Hi All,

"We don't allow faster than light neutrinos in here" said the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar and orders a drink.


Best,

Les D

[CraigS]

I should correct what I said in my post #4 in so far as I didn't really mean latency in the detectors would cause a faster than light speed measurement …. fairly clearly, any latency effect in the detector would return a slower than light speed .. but what about 'latency' at the emitter end ?

How do they know precisely when bunch of neutrinos started to leave the emitter (so as to start the clock, or record the departure time)?

What if some sneak out before they record the departure time ?

The report seems to say that the answer to the above questions are all the function of a statistical model .. which is probabilistic in nature.

Cheers

[renormalised (Carl)]

I'm starting to wonder whether it is a neutrino distribution that they've actually measured?

Wondering whether it was neutrinos they were measuring, Craig. Could be, or maybe certain flavours of neutrinos have tachyon-like properties.

One of the properties of tachyons is the less energy they have the faster they go. So, for a tachyon that is traveling only a shade faster than light, the same horrible consequences of "infinite mass and energy" dog them. However, they behave in a gravitational field in exactly the same way as ordinary particles of matter do....since mass, whether it's imaginary or not, is still mass. In other words, they gain their mass in exactly the same way as ordinary matter, only it's mass is the mirror opposite of the mass of an ordinary particle.

[Karls48 (Karl)]

Neutrinos, Tachyons travelling faster then light – bah., it was well known that atom of the pickle is green and sour. Give Copernicus the image of Mars surface and see what he would make of it. To believe that current scientific understanding of the Universe that we are (maybe) part of is in the words of Mark Twain, “bit premature “. Most of scientific conclusions that prevail today will be most likely drastically changed or completely rebuked in next thousand years. Regardless of the maths that supports it. I’m not saying that we should not speculate and examine the world that surrounds us. But to present speculations about something, that general public cannot verify, as scientifically proven fact is at best - misleading.
By the way – if Higgs Bossons does not exist – what is the implication for applied technology?
And – no I do not have science paper reviewed by peers to support this- but I got few thousand years of history to go by.

[bojan]

Looks like high energy neutrinos (produced in CERN) are experiencing Lorentz-violating oscillations and can travel FTL.

From wiki article :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrin...nova_neutrinos

. In 1985 it was proposed by Chodos et al. that neutrinos can have a tachyonic nature.[35][36] Today, the possibility of having standard particles moving at superluminal speeds is a natural consequence of unconventional dispersion relations that appear in the Standard-Model Extension,[37][38][39] a realistic description of the possible violation of Lorentz invariance in field theory. In this framework, neutrinos experience Lorentz-violating oscillations and can travel faster than light at high energies.

[CraigS]

Originally Posted by bojan

Looks like high energy neutrinos (produced in CERN) are experiencing Lorentz-violating oscillations and can travel FTL.

From wiki article :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrin...nova_neutrinos

Yep, I agree … using classifying terms like neutrino and tachyons, may also be a misleading part in all of this.

Figure 13 of the paper shows that the higher energy particles are around 60ns FTL, and the lower ones are around 50 ns FTL, so, the faster particles exhibit more energy. The possibility of measurement inaccuracies (etc) aside, at the very least, this shows that what they've measured is behaving closer to what we relate to as 'neutrinos' than 'tachyons', when considered from a two parameter perspective. (Which should carry more weight than a single parameter view).

Fascinating stuff. At the end of the day, there's only one thing which makes sense .. independent tests and subsequent verification !

Cheers

[renormalised (Carl)]

Like I said earlier, they maybe exhibiting tachyon-like behaviour but they're not tachyons, per se.

[renormalised (Carl)]

Just had a thought....I wonder for how long the debate on this will run on for. It could conceivably be several years before any substantive, independent tests can be carried out in full. These guys tested their results 16000 times. In order to get anything meaningful out of independently testing this, the others are going to have to do similarly as the Gran Sasso team. Test it till the wheels fall off. This is too important a result not to do so.

[CraigS]

I understand, (although I now can't remember where I read this), that the MINOS/Fermilab set up may only require (relatively minor) electronics upgrade funding to retest. That would seem to be the best bet .. and only funding related.

One has to wonder whether or not, this might have been OPERA's motives for making this announcement in the way they have, as it demonstrates the need for at least two facilities, world-wide, in order to verify typical ground-breaking discoveries. If someone doesn't make a second facility available elsewhere, then there's always going to be some doubt about results unique to a given lab. And, they've just about shut Fermilab down .. I'm not sure what it is they've got it funded for at the moment. (This is understandable, mind you, given that the LHC is up & running & healthy).

I wonder how this will be handled in the case of 'ground-breaking' LHC findings (if any are forthcoming) ?

Cheers

[renormalised (Carl)]

That's the other thing....who's going to do the independent testing. They've just about thrown the plastic covers over the chairs at Fermilab. If they close completely, it doesn't leave too many others capable of doing the work. What a pity if this result gets left up in their air just because no one can get the funding to do the independent tests.

[CraigS]

We shouldn't forget the T2K lab in Japan … it is capable, also.

Cheers

[renormalised (Carl)]

Ah....forgot them

It doesn't leave too many labs capable of carrying out the experiments.

[sjastro]

The researchers now have an issue that is not only the bane of experimental science but also crops up in other areas such as industry.

The test is repeatable but is it reproducible?.

Having participated in reproducibility testing along with other laboratories around the world, a problem the researchers have is that the number of laboratories that are currently able to perform this test is woefully small.
For a reproducibility test to be statistically valid, the number of laboratories participating has to be quite high.

Regards

Steven

[renormalised (Carl)]

Yep.....and that is going to cloud the minds of many of the scientists. But what can you do??!!!. If you only have one or two other labs that can do the work, then that's what you've got to work with.

I think they'll just have to take this into consideration when deciding about this result.

[CraigS]

Originally Posted by sjastro

The researchers now have an issue that is not only the bane of experimental science but also crops up in other areas such as industry.

The test is repeatable but is it reproducible?.

Having participated in reproducibility testing along with other laboratories around the world, a problem the researchers have is that the number of laboratories that are currently able to perform this test is woefully small.
For a reproducibility test to be statistically valid, the number of laboratories participating has to be quite high.

Here we go again … the Principle of Locality vs Counterfactual Definiteness !

Cheers
PS: Meaning .. are the results at Gran Sasso influenced directly by their immediate surroundings … or can we speak meaningfully of the definiteness of their results … which no one else might ever be able to replicate ?
… Just kidding around.
Cheers

[Susil]

Lets be patient util some more details available on this. The results are said to be within 60 ns time frame. Probably it will take some time until another Lab can reproduce the same results such as neutrinos travelling greater than C (the speed of light in a vacuum). Hopefully they can provide substantial evidence on repeatability (plus statistical validity) and particularly on the methods/theories used for measuring the mass of neutrinos (before we change the way we looked at our Universe)

Regards

SZ

[sjastro]

Originally Posted by CraigS

Here we go again … the Principle of Locality vs Counterfactual Definiteness !

Cheers
PS: Meaning .. are the results at Gran Sasso influenced directly by their immediate surroundings … or can we speak meaningfully of the definiteness of their results … which no one else might ever be able to replicate ?
… Just kidding around.
Cheers

Neither. The immediate objective is to examine the experiment itself not the theory. Is the experimental design valid? Have the engineers stuffed up yet another great scientific adventure (sorry no offense meant) resulting in systematic errors?

The irony is that if neutrinos do in fact exceed the speed of light, one of the first casualties is the Principle of Locality (along with SR). The Principle of Locality requires that information cannot exceed the speed of light as causality is violated. Yet if neutrinos exceed the speed of light the principle is no longer valid.

Regards

Steven

[renormalised (Carl)]

Probably the case, hey Steven. Leave the science to engineers and you end up with lots of egg on the face

And one big stuff up

Should sack the lot of them

[renormalised (Carl)]

Here's a thought.....if neutrinos can exceed "c", then what else does (apart from tachyons, of course).

[sjastro]

Originally Posted by renormalised

Probably the case, hey Steven. Leave the science to engineers and you end up with lots of egg on the face

We already know what happens when engineers dabble in "science", they come with nonsense such as the Electric Sun model.

Regards

Steven

PS Apologies to all sound minded engineers out there.