Brian Cox on Cern's baffling light-speed find

[Tank]

Something appears to be moving faster than the speed of light.

John Petrucci's fingers?

I wouldn't have gotten this joke until last year. Wish it hadn't taken me so long to discover Dream Theater
My impression is that this was about more than an inaccurate experiment. It sounded like there was discontent with him for other reasons. Who knows why, maybe management style?

It does look like he's been scapegoated for some reason.

[Crocoduck]

If anyones still interested.

2012 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: Faster Than the Speed of Light

On Tuesday, March 20, 2012, over 5,000 people tuned in to the live stream of the 2012 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate from the LeFrak Theater at the American Museum of Natural History.

Hosted by Hayden Planetarium Director Neil deGrasse Tyson, this year's debate pitted some of the experimentalists who claimed to have discovered faster-than-light neutrinos against their strongest critics, as well as other teams who are racing to test Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity with unprecedented precision.

2012 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: Faster Than the Speed of Light

[Tank]

^^^ I'll put aside a couple of hours to watch that later. Thanks for the link.

[Tank]

Einstein was right, neutrino researchers admit

Researchers working at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) caused a storm last year when they published experimental results showing that neutrinos could out-pace light by some six kilometres (3.7 miles) per second.

Researchers working at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) caused a storm last year when they published experimental results showing that neutrinos could out-pace light by some six kilometres (3.7 miles) per second.

The findings threatened to upend modern physics and smash a hole in Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which described the velocity of light as the maximum speed in the cosmos.

But CERN now says that the earlier results were wrong and faulty kit was to blame.

"Although this result isn't as exciting as some would have liked, it is what we all expected deep down," said the centre's research director Sergio Bertolucci.

"The story captured the public imagination, and has given people the opportunity to see the scientific method in action.

"An unexpected result was put up for scrutiny, thoroughly investigated and resolved in part thanks to collaboration between normally competing experiments. That's how science moves forward."

The neutrinos were timed on the journey from CERN's giant underground lab near Geneva to the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy, after travelling 732 kilometres (454 miles) through the Earth's crust.

To do the trip, the neutrinos should have taken 0.0024 seconds. Instead, the particles were recorded as hitting the detectors in Italy 0.00000006 seconds sooner than expected, the preliminary experiment had shown.

Researchers updated the science community on Friday at the International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics, being held in Japan's ancient capital of Kyoto.

"The previous data taken up to 2011 with the neutrino beam from CERN to Gran Sasso were revised taking into account understood instrumental effects," the team said.

Good science done well is self correcting. So while it would have been a fantastic outcome to find that the speed of light is not a universal speed limit the fact that it has been discovered that the instrumentalist was at fault demonstrates the fundamental accuracy of Einstein's original intuition.  

[markmcdaniel]

So true. Its a pity that the original data was incorrect. The possibilities would have been interesting to say the least.