Usual sloppy reporting, or the sound of physics changing?

[seawasp]

This report claims actual scientists at CERN appear to have found something  -- neutrinos -- exceeding the speed of light. Not by a huge amount (about 2.5 parts in 100,000 if I do my math right), but ANY amount is just not possible as we currently understand things.

Of course, knowing science reporting...

Comments

[shanejayell.livejournal.com]

If it's true, it could be very significant.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Also echoed at physorg.com. Okay, I'm skeptical...but I'll be waiting to hear more, too.

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

I am firmly in the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" camp.

[argonel.livejournal.com]

Sounds like an experiment that needs to be repeated a few times by different groups of people. Also calibration of timing instruments needs to reviewed.

[goodluckfox.livejournal.com]

It's gotta ve something in the timing. I don't think they found out their partcles were fast, I think they just priced that their timing mechanisms were slow. Maybe time passes at different rates in the two locations and it results in an error?

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

It's been pointed out that everything makes sense if the labs are 20 meters farther apart than they were thought to be (over 730 kilometers). I'm sure that's one of the first things to be checked, but it does point out that we're looking at a very small discrepancy.

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

I do appreciate that the CERN release boiled down to "somebody see where we screwed up?"

[ariaflame.livejournal.com]

Good science involves trying to imagine everything you might have done wrong in getting your results.

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

From this morning's formal announcement: they're really not sure what's going on. The primary purpose of the announcement and release of data is to give the scientific community the opportunity to figure out the mistake. At the moment, they just don't know. There is much speculation among the neutrino folks at MIT (I work with them :) but no answers, not yet. My guess is the timing of the neutrino emitter or receiver is off. It's hard enough keeping two side-by-side computers accurate to within 1/10 of a second. They're doing it -- or failing to do it if my guess is correct -- at 10 nanosecond accuracy at a distance of almost 500 miles.

[saladin-count0.livejournal.com]

well the experiment was some time ago and they searched for an error but found nothing
the cern-people think that the machines worked just fine
so now someone else has to repeat the experiment
interesting times :-)))))