It appears that the superluminal neutrino results that had everybody excited for a few months may have a pretty mundane explanation.
What might have been the biggest physics story of the past century may instead be down to a faulty connection.
In September 2011, the Opera experiment reported it had seen particles called neutrinos evidently travelling faster than the speed of light.
The team has now found two problems that may have affected their test in opposing ways: one in its timing gear and one in an optical fibre connection.
More tests from May will determine just how they affect measured speeds.
Not that I was expecting that a century of physics was about to be overthrown, but I was kind of holding out hope that the explanation would be of a type that might throw light on some heretofore undiscovered phenomena and so enhance our knowledge of the universe.
Bad wiring isn�t going to do that, and so even though it was always the most likely explanation for the results, I can�t help but be disappointed now that said simplest explanation appears to be the right one.
I heard they re-ran and calculated a 60ns error because of the loose coupler.... so that's it.
ReplyDeleteAmazing, people admitting something went wrong. Maybe someone should bring this rare event to the attention of all our "lords & masters", NATO, almost all Western media etc., in the faint hope some radical, in any of the groups, might think it'd be one of those best practice things that would be good to adopt.
ReplyDeleteand we should remember that when they released the results it was like.. "errr. we have these results. we don't believe them. but we can't figure out any errors that would create this difference, so, for completeness, we are reporting that... blah blah."
ReplyDeleteand, in the end, they found the error.