Are you intending to back it up wih some evidence, or just expect everyone to believe you?

If their timing is off, its really bad news. Timing down to the picosecond should be easily achievable. I do it in my lab every day, with a lot less fancy equipment than CERN undoubtedly has.

IIUC, the issue may be around the synchronisation of the time between CERN and OPERA.

One thing that is still very cool about this, we are able to shoot neutrinos through the earth and measure them on the other side.. Personally I think this is very cool and well a bit scary..

I’m not sure why you’d find it scary. Neutrinos emitted by the sun pass through the Earth at the rate of billions every second. Neutrinos hardly ever interact with anything.

When I see someone mention the speed of light they mention it (as in a vacuum) well last time I checked the center (nor the crust) of our earth is not presented as a vacuum, now unfortunately we are not able to measure the speed of light between the two locations (as far as I know) so to me maybe it is the title of the article that really needs to be examined. Here are some of my personal optional titles that may not cause as large of an up roar “New possibilities in fluctuations of the speed of light”, or “Speed of light accelerates traveling through planets”.

I’m not sure if this is relevant.

They were not racing a beam of neutrinos against a beam of light. What we call the speed of light in a vacuum, c, falls out of Maxwell’s equations on the propagation of electromagnetic waves. Maxwell’s equations have been tested over and over and over again, and have been found to work.

Without a constant speed at which EM waves travel through a vacuum, our theory of electromagnetism would not allow us to do all the amazing things we have done with it.

Unless it’s climate science. In which case we can just build models of our assumptions and treat it like an experiment. We can also take estimate of climate sensitivity from multiple people that range from almost zero to up to 10C and have a UN panel decide which number they like and treat that number as fact in future peer-reviewed papers.

Correct me if I am wrong on this, and it is possible, but if they confirm the neutrinos were FTL then would it not indicate that relativity is incomplete rather than wrong? Similar to how Newton works very well at certain scales but isn’t adequate at relativistic speeds or in the example of Mercury’s orbit.
Instead of throwing relativity out the window as incorrect, it applies just fine within certain range and then we need additional theory to account for the discrepancy.

Not necessarily.

Some commentators are suggesting that this result could be the first hint that additional spatial dimensions exist (i.e. the neutrinos did not exceed light speed, they took a short-cut). If this is so, then SR remains intact and needs no modification.

Latest study – as reported via BBC world news piece linked to my name here – seemingly casts a fair bit of doubt on the FTL neutrinos thing.

Dangnabbit! I was hoping – albeit not really expecting – the FTL result would stand. Sigh.

Is the currently accepted theory of dark matter (DM) fatally flawed?

Wait, what?

We have a currently-accepted theory of dark matter?

Is it possible to measure photons travelling between Geneva and Gran Sasso, Italy? From what I understand they need to know the exact distance, and from there calculate the time photons would need, if they COULD travel in a straight line down to Gran Sasso? A radiosignal, being made up of photons, would suffice. But thanks to the curvature of the earth, photons either can’t travel very far at all, or have to travel following a curved path?

My point being, the neutrino-experiment lacks a control group!

What we call the speed of light in a vacuum, c, is not merely a measured quantity. It is a prediction that falls out of Maxwell’s equations.

And the experimenters determined the distance between the CERN source and the OPERA detector to within 20 m. They checked their calculations very thoroughly, and no-one is suggesting that the error was in the distance measurement.

Thus, no “control” light beam is needed to race against the neutrinos.

@Beer Case (#13): It’s not really possible to do this with photons. The thing that neutrinos have going for them is that they move through pretty much everything unimpeded. To replicate this with photons, you’d have to send them through a vacuum for that same distance.

Could some of the neutrinos convert to tachyons (hypothetical particles that always travel faster than light) or could some neutrinos have been converted from tachyons and would this perhaps explain the slightly superluminal result?

Is that at all plausible?

Why do I ask? Well many years ago I “invented” an starship with an FTL drive that worked by converting neutrinos to tachyons – or such was the technobabble anyhow!

Feel free to dismiss the idea if it is not viable at all. I can imagine that possible this could never have as large an effect as required to explain the 60ns, or that my own assumption of how *local* gravitation can also affect time dilation in relation to the overall gravitation of the planet.

Interesting, actually: that’s not a typo, since it’s not a misspelling, and it’s not a Freudian Slip. I was thinking CERN so that’s what I typed, even though I knew they were with OPERA. Is there a name for that kind of mental typo?

I believe the correct technical term is brainfart. At least that’s the one I use
Seriously though, it’s just a kind of retroactive interference, I think.

@BadAikidoka

Earth rotates and travels through space at a not insignificant speed. Do you think Italy could move sixty light-nanoseconds during the experiment?

Hmm, it shouldn’t matter at all – both sender and receiver ar travelling on the same planet. Though, it might be result of acceleration. AFAIK the Earth rotation is slowing down – does anybody know how fast exactly and what timescale we are talking about? My gut feeling is that it shouldn’t matter, but we are talking about really, really precise time measurements. Can somebody calculate it?

CERN Experiment and Violation of Newton’s Second Law in English

http://www.gsjournal.net/Science-Journals/Research%20Papers/View/3747

CERN Experiment and Violation of Newton’s Second Law in Persian

http://www.gsjournal.net/Science-Journals/Essays/View/3693

I’d love to see independent verification to confirm or refute the latest results.

I’d love to see whether we’ve taken a first step into a larger world, or just made one little mistake.