Thursday, February 23, 2012

CERN: Light Once Again Faster then Neutrinos, Problem May Have Been a Loose Cable

Don't you hate it when that happens? A bad connection and all of a sudden you're calling Einstein a moron?
From CERN:

UPDATE 23 February 2012

The OPERA collaboration has informed its funding agencies and host laboratories that it has identified two possible effects that could have an influence on its neutrino timing measurement. These both require further tests with a short pulsed beam. If confirmed, one would increase the size of the measured effect, the other would diminish it. The first possible effect concerns an oscillator used to provide the time stamps for GPS synchronizations. It could have led to an overestimate of the neutrino's time of flight. The second concerns the optical fibre connector that brings the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken. If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos. The potential extent of these two effects is being studied by the OPERA collaboration. New measurements with short pulsed beams are scheduled for May....
From ZDNet:
CERN speed-of-light breakthrough the result of a glitch?
The surprising discovery of neutrinos traveling faster than light, which would challenge some of our core assumptions of physics, may have been the result of errors in the equipment used in the experiment.
Scientists at CERN shocked the physics establishment last September, when they said tests in the enormous Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Racking Apparatus (OPERA) experiment appeared to have shown the subatomic particles traveling slightly faster than the speed of light. According to Einstein's Theory, nothing can move faster than light....MORE