It’s Official: Neutrinos Can’t Beat Speed of Light
By Wired UKEmail Author June 8, 2012 | 2:15 pm |

By Mark Brown, Wired UK

Physicists at the CERN laboratory have put the final nail in the coffin for the idea that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light. They also confirmed that the groundbreaking results from 2011 can be blamed on faulty equipment.


Back in September 2011, a team of particle physicists detected neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light as they traveled from CERN to the Gran Sasso lab. They smashed the universal speed limit by 60 nanoseconds — a result that was constant, even after 15,000 repetitions of the process.


The results seem to run counter to a century’s worth of physics and would overturn Einsten’s special theory of relativity if true. As such, CERN called for more experiments to double-check the findings.

“When an experiment finds an apparently unbelievable result, it’s normal procedure to invite broader scrutiny,” CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci said at the time. “We need to be sure that there are no other, more mundane, explanations.”


At the International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto on June 8, CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci presented results on the travel time of neutrinos from CERN to the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory, on behalf of four experiments — Borexino, Icarus, LVD and Opera.

All four experiments measured a neutrino time of flight that was below the speed of light, confirming that neutrinos respect Einstein’s cosmic speed limit. The previous anomaly was “attributed to a faulty element of the experiment’s fibreoptic timing system.”

“Although this result isn’t as exciting as some would have liked,” said Bertolucci, “it is what we all expected deep down.”

“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.”

In March 2012, Antonio Ereditato — spokesperson of the Opera experiment — resigned from his post. That was following revelations that the results could have been affected by an unaccounted-for error, and a follow-up test from Icarus that ran counter to Opera’s findings.

DEERRR! A light switch???? DEERRR!!!

Suuuuuuure. We discover faster-than-light particles and suddenly there's an "error"? Right. Okay. I bet they said the same thing about nuclear fission when the Russians were listening. Pfft.

Give me a break. Any extreme scientific advancement will be subsumed and controlled by the military agencies that want proprietary technological supremacy. That's why science advanced----right up until the Spy Era began in the 21st century. After that, we must be distracted by iPad4 and iPhone7. No, no. No other real science being learned here. Don't pay attention. Move along sheep. Move along...

Poor dummy.

...and I was right!

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/0...ired+Science%29



Dooglas T. Mightius - 1
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