Faulty Cable To Blame For Superluminal Neutrino Results 414
smolloy writes "It would appear that the hotly debated faster-than-light neutrino observation at CERN is the result of a fault in the connection between a GPS unit and a computer. This connection was used to correct for time delays in the neutrino flight, and after fixing the correction the researchers have found that the time discrepancy appears to have vanished."
Glad they found the error (Score:5, Insightful)
I am glad they went through the proper process of verifying all the hardware and have gotten to the bottom of this little fiasco - but wow, they have to be biting their lips in frustration.
I also expect a cable manufacturer is likely to be getting a strongly worded email in the near future.
Re:Glad they found the error (Score:5, Funny)
I am glad they went through the proper process of verifying all the hardware and have gotten to the bottom of this little fiasco - but wow, they have to be biting their lips in frustration.
Why is this a fiasco? After all they discovered a pretty cheap way for FTL - just use defective cables!
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I am glad they went through the proper process of verifying all the hardware and have gotten to the bottom of this little fiasco - but wow, they have to be biting their lips in frustration.
Why is this a fiasco? After all they discovered a pretty cheap way for FTL - just use defective cables!
This model hasn't worked for government, why should it work for Science?
Re:Glad they found the error (Score:5, Funny)
I am glad they went through the proper process of verifying all the hardware and have gotten to the bottom of this little fiasco - but wow, they have to be biting their lips in frustration.
Why is this a fiasco? After all they discovered a pretty cheap way for FTL - just use defective cables!
This model hasn't worked for government, why should it work for Science?
Because, unlike government (chaotic by nature), science is deterministic?
Re: (Score:3)
I don't think "deterministic" is exactly the right word to use there. Suffice to say that science insists on verification, which government abhors.
Re:Glad they found the error (Score:4, Informative)
Suffice to say that science still insists on verification, which government abhors.
FTFY. Not to worry though, it won't take long [slashdot.org]; after all precedents exist [wikipedia.org] and, if the electorate require [slashdot.org] it, I'm sure the politicians will oblige [thechicagodope.com] ( ;) [xkcd.com] )
Re:Glad they found the error (Score:4, Informative)
How is this being modded informative?
( ;) [xkcd.com] )
Because I provided a way to signal a tongue-in-cheek type of post without the smiley-between-brackets looking wrong?
Re:Glad they found the error (Score:5, Interesting)
Suffice to say that science insists on verification.
Except in the case of Global Warming. Where the overwhelming majority of the worlds science community is contradicted by a few rogues being funded by energy companies. It indicates that being insanely rich is a great way to get most of republican Americans to believe a world wide scientific conspiracy is more likely than the concept that energy firms may just be falsifying research to protect their profit margins.
There I fixed it for you.
Re:Glad they found the error (Score:4, Informative)
Prove it false, and you are out of a job.
A proof is sufficient evidence or argument for the truth of a proposition, never for the falsity of a proposition.
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nature is deterministic, not science.
Re:Glad they found the error (Score:4, Funny)
nature is deterministic, not science.
WHOOSH!
Also, tell this to any subatomic particle next time you meet one face to face. Meantime, please abstain from opening the Schrodinger's cat box.
Re:Glad they found the error (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure Denon will have a "faster than light" TOSLINK cable for sale for $1,000+ in no time. Better to get those audio bits before time itself.
Re:Glad they found the error (Score:5, Funny)
They're so fast they're already out [amazon.com]!
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They're so fast they're already out [amazon.com]!
Mod parent +Informative, please!
Re:Glad they found the error (Score:5, Funny)
"I also expect a cable manufacturer is likely to be getting a strongly worded email in the near future."
Not really, Monoprice does not really care if the customer is doing science with their low price cables.
Re:Glad they found the error (Score:5, Informative)
The cable transmitted the signal 60ns faster than the time used in their compensation. I wouldn't call that defective.
Either the cable is shorter than they thought, or it's propagation factor is higher than specified, or they simply used the wrong number in their original calculations.
Way too early to blame anything on the cable manufacturer.
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The cable transmitted the signal 60ns faster than the time used in their compensation. I wouldn't call that defective.
Either the cable is shorter than they thought, or it's propagation factor is higher than specified, or they simply used the wrong number in their original calculations.
Way too early to blame anything on the cable manufacturer.
What's tuggin away at my trouserleg of concern is: How many other experients, with this cable in place, turned out as expected?
Bit of a poser, that one.
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Likely none.
My understanding is that the GPS setup was designed specifically for this experiment. Most experiments conducted at the LHC (or Gran Sasso) would be done entirely on-site and therefore don't need a super-accurate global time source.
Re:Glad they found the error (Score:4, Informative)
even if the propagation was at the speed of light through the cable, it would mean about a 60 length discrepancy. Unlikely to be missed
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Would be funny, except:
1. It's a fiber optic cable, it's photons, not electrons.
2. Neither photons nor electrons travel near C in a cable, they travel around 0.6C-0.7C, so they don't have to exceed C to arrive 60ns early.
Nice try though, I did get a brief chuckle out of it.
Re:Glad they found the error (Score:4, Informative)
Neither photons nor electrons travel near C in a cable, they travel around 0.6C-0.7C
Not to be pedantic, but electrons do not travel anywhere near "0.6C-0.7C" in a cable. The signal may propagate (outside of the cable) at that velocity, but the electrons themselves move much much slower.
Re:Glad they found the error (Score:4, Insightful)
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This this is science. We have skeptics who questioned the initial results. The result authors went back and reexamined the evidence, test setup, etc. Somewhere in this process, they found the truth.
Yes, this appears to be exemplary. They published their suprising observations, that got feedback, answered questions, carefully repeated their work, got the same results...
Too bad, really, that this turned out to be an "oh, sh*t" moment rather than a "gee, that's funny" moment.
Re:Glad they found the error (Score:5, Insightful)
You left out an important part. Something which makes it true scientific behaviour: The publishers themselves were the first skeptics. They basically said "Here's what we've got, this doesn't look right for all what we know, please help us to discover where we were wrong. In the meantime we'll do further tests so that we all have more material to look at."
Headline is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
It should read "Faulty Cable Most Likely To Blame For Superluminal Neutrino Results". They haven't proved anything yet. They just found a problem that's very suggestive and they need to re-run the experiment after fixing/accounting for the problem.
Face it (Score:2, Interesting)
We will never get off this rock. Interstellar travel is impossible, and always will be.
We will all grow old and die here, and that's it.
Re:Face it (Score:5, Funny)
We will never get off this rock. Interstellar travel is impossible, and always will be.
We will all grow old and die here, and that's it.
You must be a real blast at parties.
Re:Face it (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, leave poor Marvin alone. He has a brain the size of a planet and that makes up for his sometimes less than eager personality!
Re:Face it (Score:5, Funny)
As if the geekoid weirdo spouting off about terraforming Mars is the life of the party.
Re:Face it (Score:4, Funny)
i would rather share a drink with him than the guy telling me i am gonna die alone on this planet just like everyone else....
From what I've read, you're supposed to go with the topic that's most likely to get you laid.
[Listen to us slashdorks speculating about what a party would be like.]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Exceeding lightspeed is in no way required for interstellar travel. The problems of interstellar travel are, in fact, quite tractable.
We (in the sense of you and me, specifically) will indeed never get off this rock. But our grandchildren might.
Re:Face it (Score:4, Interesting)
"We (in the sense of you and me, specifically) will indeed never get off this rock. But our grandchildren might."
My grandfather said those exact words.
I'm betting you are as wrong as he was
Re:Face it (Score:4, Interesting)
They're really more like metaphorical grandchildren. Sort of like "the World of Tomorrow"—it's not actually coming within 24 hours, but it will eventually. Now extrapolate that time measurement—the duration between when flying cars were first promised and when they finally appeared and achieved widespread adoption, say. If we assume it takes a minimum of twelve years for someone to go from birth to reproductive functionality (to some this is a little harsh, I know, but that's biology for you; just remember that, to others drinking certain Monsanto-enhanced milk, it's three years excessive) then we need at least twenty-four years to get grandchildren.
So after eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty-six "tomorrows", we'll finally get off this rock.
Given that the amount of time involved in a "tomorrow" is already a hundred years and steadily growing, we will probably be a space-faring civilization within the next million years.
Not bad, when you think about it from a solar heat death perspective.
Re:Face it (Score:5, Insightful)
I recall my grandfathers. Both grew up on farms. Tilling was done with a plow pulled by draft animal. Lighting was by candle, kerosene lantern, or acetylene lamp. Water came via a bucket or hand pump from a well. One lived to see Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the Moon.
Once we talked about a few things, some prosaic, some not. His basic position was that after all the things which in his life had been generally considered impossible and which later came to pass, it seemed to him to be presumptuous to rule things in or out.
We've seen that Life exists where it can. I suspect that, whether in a form we may readily recognize or no, it may do so elsewhere. Perhaps we may, as well.
Meanwhile, check connections. [grin]
Re:Face it (Score:4, Interesting)
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If what we do on Earth is build ant hills then what we would do on Mars would be ant hills too. Really expensive ant hills, but ant hills nonetheless.
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Well, for one, the widespread availability of flying cars would imply that society is mature enough to stop panicking about terrorists and drunk teenagers at every opportunity.
You sound like an egregiously concerned parent—drunk adults accounted for 83% [edgarsnyder.com] of all drunk driving incidents in the US in 2008. I strongly recommend that you follow in the steps of Yakov Smirnoff and get some freedom instead of worrying about bogeymen.
Re:Face it (Score:5, Insightful)
This means 17% of al drunk driving incidents for about 5% of the driving population, meaning that drunk teenagers cause on average three times the incidents than adults per person.
Re:Face it (Score:4, Insightful)
Without faster than light you can get off this rock but you cannot support a civilisation. The closest star is already 4 light years away. Even at light speed, a return trip would take 8 years and that is already too much to maintain the relationship required for a civilisation - after a few generations, there will be nothing in common between the 2 worlds.
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Apparent travel time if you go as photons is zero. Why send your atoms if you can send a description of your atoms? It's way more efficient that way. If you have already uploaded your mind to software, then the atoms are irrelevant, just occupy an appropriate robot body as needed.
Besides, why can't you have intermediate stations in the Oort clouds or on rogue planets between stars? Interstellar space is far from empty by the latest thinking.
Re:Face it (Score:5, Informative)
Ahem. *bullshit*.
The heliopause, which has not yet been reached by Voyager 1 is apparently 23 x 10^9 km [universetoday.com] from earth. Alpha Centauri [wikipedia.org], the nearest star to our sun is 4.366 light years away which is 4.1306 x 10^13 km away.
If it has taken 38 years for Voyager 1 to reach the Heliopause, it would take 1,795.9 times as long to reach Alpha Centauri at that speed which comes out to something like 68,000 years. I'm assuming a couple of things of course:
* the speed so far is roughly the speed it will continue to travel
* it can escape the sun's gravitational well.
Suppose we are somehow miraculously able to accomplish the following:
* we send a system powerful enough to transmit an intelligible signal to us across 4.5 light years of space
* we somehow manage to travel 100 times faster than Voyager 1
You're still talking about roughly 680 years for it to get there. There might be some tiny relativistic effects that come into play, but I doubt they would alter the situation much. Are you sending humans? If so, you have to dramatically increase the weight of the vehicle to accommodate life-sustaining water/air/energy in which case you also need shit loads of propellant if you want to slow down on the other end. Forget entirely about the difficulty of insuring the survival of roughly 20 generations of humans against the problems of cosmic radiation and health and reproductive problems related to roughly a millenium spent weightless and getting fried by space rays.
Re:Face it (Score:4)
Traveling at 100x voyager 1 will be relatively easy. It had almost no thrust (launched at low speed from earth, then picked up speed by using gravitational assists at planets.
An extended thrust vehicle would be dramatically faster.
Or put another way:
Voyager 1 has reached an amazing 1/17572 the speed of light. We can do better.
Re:Face it (Score:5, Interesting)
Your assumptions are correct. Voyager's velocity of 17 km/s will not appreciably change, and it will escape the sun's well, as escape velocity at its current location is about 3.85 km/s.
Relativity is insignificant at 100 times Voyager's velocity as tau [wikipedia.org] at 1700 km/s is .99998, or in other words, a 1000 year trip would be shortened by about 6 days from the traveler's perspective.
The Orion and Daedalus projects of the 60s and 70s had theoretically designed spacecraft capable of anywhere from 5 to 12% of c given materials and power sources available at the time or soon available. Even then the journey is many decades and relativistic effects, though more pronounced are still not very significant (tau ~= 0.993 at 12% of c). Of course, the political and economic will to engage in such things is non-existent, so these ideas remain firmly in the realm of science fiction. I believe that Freeman Dyson computed the economic cost of an Orion class starship and concluded it would be about the same as a year's worth of the United States GDP at the time (early 70s? Don't remember). JWST has cost overruns a millionth of that amortized over nearly 20 years and was/is in danger of getting canceled.
I think that it is possible someday that we will send robotic probes to nearby star systems, and maybe manned missions to follow, but I also believe that absent some singularity-level fundamental physics breakthrough before then such things are at least a century or two away from being given any serious consideration, and the designs of those vessels will not be much like anything talked about today. As it stands, I'm not even liking the odds of seeing humans on Mars before I die (I'm 44).
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The Orion and Daedalus projects of the 60s and 70s had theoretically designed spacecraft capable of anywhere from 5 to 12% of c given materials and power sources available at the time or soon available. (...) I believe that Freeman Dyson computed the economic cost of an Orion class starship and concluded it would be about the same as a year's worth of the United States GDP at the time
It should be noted that we still in 2012 don't have the technology to build the Daedalus, so soon available is stretching it. As for Orion, the conservative design would take 1 GDP but the optimistic "momentum limited" design only 0.1 GDP. The small caveat is that it's only for the ship itself and doesn't include the cost to put 400,000 ton in orbit - the nuclear design doesn't have the thrust to launch from Earth. So cost estimates ignore the 10,000 Saturn V or 20,000 Falcon Heavy launches required, at abo
Re:Face it (Score:5, Interesting)
Thus you join a long line of people who said something is impossible, and were wrong.
First, technically 5 man-made objects are on their way to interstellar space (Pioneer 10 & 11, Voyager 1 & 2, and New Horizons). They are slow, but leaving the Solar System nonetheless.
Second, we have nuclear power. That is sufficient for "generation ships". Those travel only a small fraction of the speed of light, but with a nuclear power source you can keep a community going for generations until you arrive.
Third, nanotechnology has the promise of travel to other stars at zero effective time delay to the traveller, and speed of light actual speed. Here is how: you scan a person at atomic resolution. Then you send a *description* of their body, atom for atom via powerful laser. At the destination, a nanotech assembler builds a copy atom for atom. There are large practical challenges to doing this, but no new physics required. Sending photons describing which atoms takes about a million times less energy than sending the atoms themselves at near light-speed, so this method is vastly more efficient, and would be the first choice over antimatter or very big solar powered lasers. Those are the only ways to get more energy/kg in the vehicle than fusion that we know of, which is what you need to get substantial fraction of speed of light.
Fourth, perhaps cryostasis or life extension via cloning stem cells or some such will get developed, so even with a slow starship you can still get there.
Fifth, there is plenty to do expanding into the Solar System, including the Oort Cloud, before worrying about interstellar trips. How about we figure out how to mine the Near Earth asteroids first? They are closer in energy terms than the Moon, and it's mission energy which costs you in space, not physical distance. We can practice by mining space junk in orbit, which also helps fix the orbital debris problem.
Re:Headline is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
It should read "Faulty Cable Most Likely To Blame For Superluminal Neutrino Results". They haven't proved anything yet. They just found a problem that's very suggestive and they need to re-run the experiment after fixing/accounting for the problem.
Part of the Scientific Method* is the ability to repeat your results. When they state "the time discrepancy appears to have vanished" it would seem they are unable to reproduce the prior results.
*This Post Not Approved By Rick Santorum For President or Heartland Institute
Re:Headline is wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Don't believe everything you read in a summary. They found a loose cable that could have caused the delay. They're checking now. Despite the slashdot headline and summary, nothing has been confirmed.
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Don't believe everything you read in a summary. They found a loose cable that could have caused the delay. They're checking now. Despite the slashdot headline and summary, nothing has been confirmed.
There's still hope for my Superluminal Neutrino-powered Spaceship to the hot, steamy planet of Airline Stewardesses?
This is a great day for SCIENCE
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I have to think about this for a second, but I'd assume the neutrinos had a Very accurately measured speed. So maybe the story isn't that the neutrinos go supraluminal, its that fiber optic cable at CERN has a slightly negative velocity factor...
Now you'd think people have measured the length of fiber with a OTDR before (god knows I have enough time) but maybe there is something weird about CERNs fibre, like they had to wrap the slack somewhere and they had a 10 tesla superconductive magnet laying around o
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Don't cling to false hopes when every subsequent test by the same facility and elsewhere has failed to repeat the results.
It was a bad cable.
Period.
No FTL yet.
Making it even more important to verify. (Score:4, Insightful)
The results could be wrong, but for another reason. When trouble shooting you usually think of dozens of potential way things could have cause the problem before tracking down the actual root cause. Jumping to conclusions simply gets everyone's hopes up that the mystery has been solved.
It was a bad cable.
Period.
So if you were in charge, you would just stop looking for the root cause which may go on to taint other results at CERN for years to come? Nothing is certain until it has been confirmed.
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So much for posting AC and slightly drunk..
The carwash-point explained:
A carwash in Dutch is called a 'carwashingstreet'. See, even you know what I'm talking about. When adding spaces between those words (which is what 'english disease' is all about) the meaning of 'washing' changes to 'used to be'. So, you get from 'car washing street' to 'car used to be street', which is just silly.
Your 'trouble shooting' is as funny as a car that used to be street. Perhaps it's because I'm Dutch? You made me LOL.
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No FTL ever: it is a logical impossibilty. There was, however, hope of interesting new physics.
Re:Headline is wrong (Score:4, Informative)
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"pseudo-religious"?
Repeating the FACT that they found a flaw in the equipment which PERFECTLY explains the one-of-a-kind results is "religious"?
Methinks anyone clinging to the fading hope that we've "proven" FTL is possible are the ones who are exhibiting signs of religious fervor despite all indications that they're wrong.
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When they state "the time discrepancy appears to have vanished" it would seem they are unable to reproduce the prior results.
Who is "they"? I saw no such statement in the article.
After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fiber, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed. Since this time is subtracted from the overall time of flight, it appears to explain the early arrival of the neutrinos. New data, however, will be needed to confirm this hypothesis.
Sounds to me like they haven't actually reached the point of trying to reproduce the results yet, they just found a discrepency that very closely matches the apparently aberrant prior results.
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Do they really need to re-run the experiment to conclude the cable is to blame? If you measure something with a ruler, find out it's Mmm long, then realise your ruler is out by Nmm, it's quite easy to deduce that the thing is actually (M+/-N)mm long, without needing to re-meausure. Of course, it can be useful to check it with a new ruler, particularly when it's quite an important measurement.
Additionally or alternatively, a 60ns discrepancy in the cable transmission stuff doesn't change their actual measure
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This was described as a loose connection on a cable, and unlike a timezone change which is a known quantity, loose connections are notoriously variable. When they found the loose cable and tightened it it made a difference of 60ns, but at the time of the original experiment that same loose connection could have accounted for 0ns or 300ns or who knows what other value. Loose connections are flakey, they do weird things.
So while you can simply re-do the math when working with a known static variable change, w
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"Faulty Cable to Blame for Superluminal Neutrino Results?" would have been better, right?
But I was a little more accurate with the summary I think.
This isn't definite (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This isn't definite (Score:4, Informative)
First post ! (Score:5, Funny)
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Check the direction (Score:5, Funny)
Did they remember to plug it in with the direction marks [amazon.com] pointing to the computer?
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Did they remember to plug it in with the direction marks [amazon.com] pointing to the computer?
Pretty sure they didn't buy their cables from Denon or through Amazon ... which would likely be good enough for us, but when you are building race tracks for atomic particles you generally buy them, out of necessity of the appearance of the project, from the guy who runs the $600 toilet seat store.
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If you would check the actual link, you might note that the same guy appears to sell these cables.
updated joke (Score:4, Funny)
A neutrino walks into a bar. The bartender says, "We still don't serve neutrinos here".
Hooray! (Score:2)
(note however that they still need to re-do the neutrino test, according to the last sentence of TFA; at the moment they have merely found out that "data" sent over the fiber-optic cable arrives 60ns earlier then assumed)
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On the other hand, we still can't exceed the speed of light.
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at the moment they have merely found out that "data" sent over the fiber-optic cable arrives 60ns earlier then assumed
How does that happen? I've worked at fiber using telecom companies since 96 (customer and provider sites) and I've never heard of a loose cable causing 60 ns of constant delay. Random jitter as the connector bounces around? OK yeah. Intermittent loss? OK yeah.
You can trivially make a fiber "60 ns longer" but thats quite a length of extra fiber, not a tiny fraction of an inch.
My guess is someone thought they were purchasing a X yard long fiber cable, but the helpful installers put in a X meter long fibe
Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Funny)
at the moment they have merely found out that "data" sent over the fiber-optic cable arrives 60ns earlier then assumed
How does that happen? I've worked at fiber using telecom companies since 96 (customer and provider sites) and I've never heard of a loose cable causing 60 ns of constant delay. Random jitter as the connector bounces around? OK yeah. Intermittent loss? OK yeah.
You can trivially make a fiber "60 ns longer" but thats quite a length of extra fiber, not a tiny fraction of an inch.
My guess is someone thought they were purchasing a X yard long fiber cable, but the helpful installers put in a X meter long fiber without telling anyone, and the stereotypical telecom BS about loose connectors is the coverup for the situation. Or the gear is buggy, it stopped being buggy, and all the tech did was tighten the connectors, so "it must have been the connector". Uh huh, yeah, heard that one before.
A television repairman is condemned to Hell for his practices of deceiving and overcharging customers. On his orientation tour of the netherworld he is led past people boiling in pits of lava, having their organs pecked out by beasts and others being flayed, over and over. Thus his fear is great as he is taken down a cavern to his own assignment of eternal doom. A demon shows him to a door, which he opens to find leads to a seemingly endless cavern piled high with television sets, DVD players, cable decoders, etc. "You must fix each and every one of them", proclaims the demon. The repairman relaxes and says, "Well, that doesn't seem so bad after all." "Ah," replies the demon, "but every one of them has an intermittent problem."
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Maybe an impedance mismatch at the end(s) of the cable caused the biggest part of the signal to reflect back and forth a couple of times, over the entire length of the cable?
60ns delay is 18m of cable.
Or 6m of cable in which the signal bounces back and forth once.
ADC GPS
ADC ----- GPS
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60ns delay is 18m of cable.
Or 6m of cable in which the signal bounces back and forth once.
ADC <----- GPS
ADC -----> GPS
ADC <----- GPS
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Science wasn't broken before. In fact, had these results been replicated, it would have been a triumph of science.
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they still need to re-do the neutrino test, according to the last sentence of TFA; at the moment they have merely found out that "data" sent over the fiber-optic cable arrives 60ns earlier then assumed
Why to they need to re-do the test? Isn't the point of this not that their raw data was wrong, but the calculations they did based on that data were wrong? The data should still be fine, they just used a dodgy figure when turning their raw data into a speed calculation.
Kind of like measuring the time it takes someone to run a mile in order to calculate their average speed, getting puzzled as to how fast it was, then realising they only ran a kilometre - the raw time data is still accurate, you just need to
Loose cables? (Score:5, Funny)
Is there any way we can pin this on Julian Assange?
Monster Cables (Score:5, Funny)
That's why I use Monster Cables for my neutrino experiments. It increases the roundness of the bass end, creates a punchier mid-range, and makes my neutrinos less superluminal.
"and after fixing the correction" (Score:2)
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hmm? I read it as fixing the system responsible for the correction. Not as fixing the connection (even though in this case, they're the same thing)
I love the 'Faster than light neutrino' story (Score:4, Insightful)
I love the 'Faster than light neutrino' story. It shows something about how science works... an unconfirmed but sensational result captures our imagination. Though fascinating, it is treated with skepticism by scientists including the group publishing the results. Alternative hypotheses challenging the result are examined, and many discarded.
Eventually the result will be supported by more experiments or found to be incorrect... maybe even the result of a loose cable.
The neutrino story also shows something about how science is reported in much of the press... Unconfirmed but sensational results are presented as true. Preliminary challenges to the result are also reported as true. By the time the story is done, news outlets have misreported a number of contradictory claims as fact. No wonder a significant subset of the population doesn't understand or even believe science.
Should have called tech support (Score:3)
Oblig XKCD (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why (Score:2)
Joke (Score:4, Funny)
The bartender says "We don't allow your kind in here".
A faster-than-light neutrino walks into a bar.
Elecrical faults are devious (Score:3)
However the way to deal with this is to have several different models GPS units connected to several different computers and verify synchronization. That is not easy at the level of precision we are talking about here, though. So I do not blame them. And they wisely never did a sensationalist press=release, just "this is what we see and we do not understand it". Now they do. These things can happen.
Wiki article has the best technical summary so far (Score:4, Informative)
So, it seems that the previously calculated stddev was -5.9/+8.3ns [wikipedia.org], which is about double the certainty of the best COTS systems (it had better be, they're plugged directly into atomic clocks). Basically:
"A loose connection between the fiber link from a GPS receiver to a computer is thought to cause the 60 nanosecond delay; tightening the connection makes the delay through the fiber decrease. However, additional data has to be taken to test the hypothesis. A second error with the crystal oscillator is expected to have lengthened the reported flight-time of neutrinos. Repeat tests with short pulsed beams have been scheduled for May. The two errors affect the result in opposite ways. The OPERA collaboration has not released quantitative estimates of how the errors affect the results, and expect to check the effects directly when a bunched beam is available later in 2012."
So this thing is far from over...
Meanwhile, back at the bar... (Score:4, Funny)
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Everyone knows pizza isn't Italian.
Stupid ursine...
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>Fuck it, I'm going to Greece.
>Go to Greece.
>Considering marrying a Greek girl
>Berlusconi is there
You missed a golden opportunity for "My big fat greek superluminal experiment" jokes. You know, the one where the groom gets slapped by his future mother in law, then his future cousin in law tricks the groom into telling his mother in law that she has a nice pair of superluminal neutrinos... get it, she slaps him superluminally before he gets tricked?
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With the massive economic meltdown, prices on Greek slave girls have never been lower.
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It's cute how you think there's some responsible way to inform the press of an anomalous experimental result.
The scientists just did the same thing you'd do if you got some weird result on a browser-based application, and the preliminary obvious steps didn't fix the problem: check to see if everyone else is seeing the same thing on their browsers, so to speak.
It's not their fault if someone in Marketing hears what's going on and writes a company-wide email saying "BROWSERS CAPABLE OF MAGIC!!! Film at eleven
Re:Irresponsible use of the press (Score:5, Insightful)
With all due respect, nothing personal, but the ideas you expressed are completely wrong. Kids need to learn that science is experimenting and debating and arguing and trying things that mostly don't work but sometimes they do. There is no cabal and smart people sometimes disagree, most importantly they disagree in a civilized manner. And getting excited and theorizing and double checking your work and then triple checking your work and lots of sweat and effort and long hours. Initial results are sometimes wrong. Where do errors come from? And sometimes how you deal with "failure" defines who you are, more than how you deal with "success".
Science is not (or should not be) a scholastic endeavor that we should try to make as boring and authoritarian and slow and uninteresting as possible. If anything try to make it the opposite, at least a little bit.
If this whole story makes one kid think, just a little bit, about physics, that makes it OK. This is the best thing thats happened to physics in years.
If science were as flaky as a reality TV show, then I'd support your position because somewhere in between is the greek ideal. But... there's a long way to go before we have to worry about that.
Re:Irresponsible use of the press (Score:5, Insightful)
These scientists were irresponsible in their dealings with their press.
I never saw a single irresposible statement from them. They were very clear that there was likely to be an error in their experiment. The press wasn't irresponsible either. Every article I read was balanced and careful to state that there may be a simple explaination.
They should have kept it strictly within the community ...
Who exactly is "the community"? Scientists are not a priesthood, and the public does not need to be "protected" from scientific debate.
Re:Irresponsible use of the press (Score:5, Insightful)
Bollocks, I am pretty sure it was always explained as an unexpected result, not a new discovery.
How would they do that?
It is far better for the public to see scientists acting openly, showing their data and asking for help. Science is a process, not a result. Trying to get the public to trust science by hiding things from them is precisely the wrong way to go about it. It is akin to suggesting they should trust the scientist because the scientist is always right rather than because the process of science works.
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Re:XKCD pretty much predicted this (Score:4, Informative)
Uh many, many people predicted that it would turn out not to be true. An error was considered the most likely explanation from the beginning, even by the publishers.
And much like the XKCD author, everyone who predicted that it wouldn't be true would have been ecstatic to be wrong.
What I find much more amusing is all the people who instantly jumped on the result and assumed it was true and proof of whatever they wanted it to be proof of -- from 'science is all a lie' to 'my replacement for Relativity which The Man has stifled is now proven correct!'
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