A Small Glimmer of Hope For Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos 183
sciencehabit writes "The CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva has confirmed Wednesday's report that a loose fiber-optic cable may be behind measurements that seemed to show neutrinos outpacing the speed of light. But the lab also says another glitch could have caused the experiment to underestimate the particles' speed. The other effect concerns an oscillator that gives its readings time stamps synchronized to GPS signals. Researchers think correcting for an error in this device would actually increase the anomaly in neutrino velocity, making the particles even speedier than the earlier measurements seemed to show."
Re:Poor Quality Assurance does not boost confidenc (Score:5, Interesting)
It's more like CERN isn't going to pull any punches and will release all the information they have about things instead of holding it back to make themselves look good.
Hell, some people seem to think CERN only did one experiment then screamed about faster than light. Instead, they did hundreds if not THOUSANDS of experiments before releasing a paper with a cautioning tone, asking for others to attempt replication or determine what could be the issue.
The fact that they found two *potential* issues, doesn't detract from the fact that they're an extremely cautious and skeptical group.
Re:Poor Quality Assurance does not boost confidenc (Score:5, Interesting)
I love how the idea that anything running counter to the concepts of mass / length / time dilation happening at high speeds with relative simultaneity is considered insane. Oh, that's demonstrably insane, but Heisenberg and light-speed limitations on information transmittal, THOSE are the new rational. And that's not even getting into quantum effects.
I don't mean to pick on the science behind any of that. But Science long ago left the realm of anything that could be considered judgable based upon common sense. Any normal person from 300 years ago would consider science off its rocker, except for the fact that it's provably true (at least, the provably true parts are). We're firmly in a world where proof and experiments are more important.
Also considering the dead end we've had with strings, it's about time for a major sub-quantum theoretical shakeup.