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TIMING GLITCHES DOG NEUTRINO SPEED CLAIM
Team admits to possible errors in faster-than-light finding.

by....Eugenie Samuel Reich
27 February 2012 (Today)

Is it an epic blunder or a textbook demonstration of how science should work? To some physicists, the OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tracking Apparatus) collaboration deserves credit for disclosing possible errors in its paradigm-challenging measurement of neutrinos travelling faster than light. “I think we did the right thing to continue to investigate,” says Dario Autiero of the Institute of Nuclear Physics of Lyons in France, who presented the original results and notes that the collaboration had spent six months checking its result before its announcement last September.

To others, the revelation shows that the OPERA team went public too soon with its claim that neutrinos from CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland, were flouting Albert Einstein’s absolute limit on the speed of light as they travelled the 730 kilometres to the OPERA detector at the underground Gran Sasso National Laboratory near L’Aquila, Italy. “I find it embarrassing,” says Luca Stanco of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Padova, Italy, an OPERA member who initially refused to sign a paper about the result. “Maybe we should have been more cautious and done more checks.”

ExpandOn 23 February, OPERA team members reported two possible sources of error in the experiment. The initial result suggested that the neutrinos were reaching the detector 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light would allow. Both potential errors would affect the neutrinos’ arrival time, as measured by OPERA’s master clock (see ‘Timing trouble’). The first is a faulty connection at the point at which the light from a fibre-optic cable brings a synchronizing Global Positioning System (GPS) signal into the master clock. The fault could have delayed the GPS signal, causing the master clock to run slow and thus causing the neutrinos’ travel time to appear shorter than it actually was.

“It’s a subtle effect,” says Autiero, and one that was evident only when the team examined many measurements of signals passing through the connection. Tests of the timing system turned up a second, opposing effect: an oscillator within the master clock that keeps time between the arrivals of synchronization signals was running fast. That would have made the neutrinos’ travel time seem longer.

The collaboration says that it has not yet worked out the magnitude of these effects. Autiero says that because of the high profile of the result and the possibility of rumours and leaks, the collaboration wanted to disclose the potential errors promptly. The OPERA team plans to correct the faults and repeat the experiment after CERN’s neutrino beam is switched on again in March, following a winter break.

Two independent checks of the measurement are also being considered. One, at Japan’s Tokai to Kamioka (T2K) neutrino experiment, would still be valuable despite the doubt cast on the OPERA data, but may now prove harder to *fund*, says international co-spokesman Chang Kee Jung, a physicist at Stony Brook University in New York. But another, the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment, which fires neutrinos from Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, to an underground detector in northern Minnesota, will proceed, at a cost of about US$500,000. “It’s never a bad idea to have multiple measurements,” says MINOS co-spokesman Rob Plunkett.

Jorge Páramos, a physicist at the Higher Technical Institute in Lisbon, says that the admissions by OPERA point to an honest mistake, albeit one that should have been avoided. “The putative origin of the systematic error reflects the innards of the experiment — something that should have been checked exhaustively before any public announcement,” he says.

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***My Thoughts Regarding Para 6
Of course *funding for new and independent Neutrino Experiment will be more difficult if not impossible to obtain funding.
My rather unscientific thoughts are that it may have been better not to have ever done the Neutrino versus Light Speed experiment.
Then the Scientific world of Astronomy and Physics could return to the speed of Light status quo that has been accepted and enjoyed since the time of Einstein and the new physics.
This tiny speed glitch has upset the apple cart and is going to cost an enormous
amount of money spent to make things right for the scientists to accept?

In fact I am going to stick my neck out (once again), and predict that the absolute speed of the Neutrino when equated to the speed of light will either be found to appear faster or slower than the speed of light.
I liken the problem to the the experiments in reaching the temperature of Absolute Zero. We know what it is in theory...but can never reach it.
Now we supposedly know the (absolute?) speed of light, and electricity etc....But when we
try to measure the speed of other magnetic fields and particles by USING the speed of light as the basis of all measurements ...we are asking for trouble??

I say the speed of Light is theoretical!
What "Rubbish".. I hear you all say.
Are you sure?
Well we do accept the fact that light slows down when it passes thru a medium, and speeds up again in the vacuum of space.
But we can never ever measure light speed in a true vacuum, nor have we ever done so. That equates to the fact that, like reaching absolute Zero , we can never ever know the absolute speed of light. So lets accept its speed in a vacuo as 2.997924590(8) x10 pwr 8m s-1 or C, and leave it at that!
Does light vary its speed in a different and distant universe? If it does ...does it affect us in some way? Has light speed made a difference to Voyager I and Voyager2 speeds, both launched 35 years ago? Or was it the Aliens that somehow affected one of the Voyagers speed....as I rem reading years ago.

The more Labs that go on and try to measure the speed of light ....the more minute differences they will come up with, and the longer they will be at each others throats.
I think in the end we will all accept the thoretical speed of light once the
various scientific labs, universities, and bodies, finally come to terms with each other.

Just a month later after my previous letter,
at least 60 Cern Scientists have used the CERN-SPS Accelerator briefly, in a lower intensity Neutrino
mode. And have come to the conclusion that all ihe
particles in this particular experiment are compatible with the simultaneous arrival of all events with equal speed, the one of light.
This is a striking difference between the Swiss/Italian OPERA claim, that Neutrino particles arrived about 60 ns
earlier than Light Speed.

***Thoughts
Because the basis of Physics, Time and Space of our World rest upon our perceived speed measurements of light particles.
It would be best for SCIENCE to be in agreement.
Trust me...there will be more to come.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.3433

Of course, if João Magueijo is right, the speed of light was faster in the early Universe. Could we be sure it is not still slowing down. If it were, would that mean that neutrinos would eventually be able to travel faster than ligh, or would they, and everything else, also slow down?

IF the speed of light is slowing down, and that is an awfully big if, then I would expect that everything else would also be slowing down. After all, the whole universe works on the basis that the speed of light is the universal speed limit. Just off the top of my head I don't see how changes in the speed of light could occur without messing up the way the universe does work. Given e = mc^2, if c was changing then all the various masses in the universe would be changing also. AS far as I can see that would really mess up the evolution of the universe in accordance with General Relativity.

Bill Gill

It’s a long time since I read Magueijo’s “Faster Than the Speed of Light”, perhaps I should re-read it with e=mc^2 in mind.

For anyone who has not read it, I can recommend it for its very readable style, and humour.

I have just been 'checking up' on the physics of the
Neutrino.....and guess what surprise, surprise.
Neutrino's corkscrew along the direction of their travel!

The Neutrino ALWAYS corkscrews in a lefthanded way along the direction of its travel
Nobody has EVER found a righthanded corkscrewing Neutrino.
(prehaps they dont exist in our world)

I am surprised as probably you are about this? But I have had a strange thought about this fact.
What if the 'tightness' of the corkscrewing was affected by some external influence......?
If tighter it would travel slower, and if looser would travel faster?
Does that make any sense?
My other thought is....Since Neutrino's corkscrew, when
they travel.....Then to equal the speed of light, and arrive at the same time, since they corkscrew, THEY MUST TRAVEL FASTER than light? Since light travels in a straight line. And the Neutrino in corkscrewing must travel further!!
Could someone at CERN tell me why I am going mad.

They spin as they move I am not sure where you got the corkscrew idea from.

A ball can spin as it moves in a straight line watch a tennis game or soccer game. In both sports good players use the spin to bend the ball in the air the ball is most definitely not corkscrewing but it is spinning.