[meteorite-list] Second experiment confirms faster-than-light particles

[JoshuaTreeMuseum]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/second-experiment-confirms-faster-than-light-particles/2011/11/17/gIQAlRlTWN_story.html?hpid=z5

Second experiment confirms faster-than-light particles:

While the second experiment "has made an important test of consistency of 
its result," Ferroni added, "a final word can only be said by analogous 
measurements performed elsewhere in the world."

That is, more tests are needed, and on other experimental setups. There is 
still a large crowd of skeptical physicists who suspect that the original 
measurement done in September was an error.

Should the results stand, they would upend more than a century of modern 
physics.

In the first round of experiments, a massive detector buried in a mountain 
in Gran Sasso, Italy, recorded neutrinos generated at the CERN particle 
accelerator on the French-Swiss border arriving 60 nanoseconds sooner than 
expected. CERN is the French acronym for European Council for Nuclear 
Research.

A chorus of critiques from physicists soon followed. Among other possible 
errors, some suggested that the neutrinos generated at CERN were smeared 
into bunches too wide to measure precisely.

So in recent weeks, the OPERA team tightened the packets of neutrinos that 
CERN sent sailing toward Italy. Such tightening removed some uncertainty in 
the neutrinos' speed.

The detector still saw neutrinos moving faster than light.

"One of the eventual systematic errors is now out of the way," said Jacques 
Martino, director of the National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics 
in France, in a statement.

But the faster-than-light drama is far from over, Martino added. The OPERA 
team is discussing more cross-checks, he added, including possibly running a 
fiber the 454 miles between the sites.

For more than a century, the speed of light has been locked in as the 
universe's ultimate speed limit. No experiment had seen anything moving 
faster than light, which zips along at 186,000 miles per second.

Much of modern physics - including Albert Einstein's famous theory of 
relativity - is built on that ultimate speed limit.

The scientific world stopped and gaped in September when the OPERA team 
announced it had seen neutrinos moving just a hint faster than light.

"If it's correct, it's phenomenal," said Rob Plunkett, a scientist at 
Fermilab, the Department of Energy physics laboratory in Illinois, in 
September. "We'd be looking at a whole new set of rules" for how the 
universe works.

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Phil Whitmer

Joshua Tree Earth & Space Museum

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The bartender says "we don't serve your kind in here."

A neutrino walks into a bar.