Study rejects "faster than light" particle finding

[n2doc]

By Robert EvansPosted 2011/11/20 at 6:35 pm EST

GENEVA, Nov. 20, 2011 (Reuters) — An international team of scientists in Italy studying the same neutrino particles colleagues say appear to have travelled faster than light rejected the startling finding this weekend, saying their tests had shown it must be wrong.


The September announcement of the finding, backed up last week after new studies, caused a furor in the scientific world as it seemed to suggest Albert Einstein's ideas on relativity, and much of modern physics, were based on a mistaken premise.

The first team, members of the OPERA experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory south of Rome, said they recorded neutrinos beamed to them from the CERN research center in Switzerland as arriving 60 nanoseconds before light would have done.

But ICARUS, another experiment at Gran Sasso -- which is deep under mountains and run by Italy's National Institute of National Physics -- now argues that their measurements of the neutrinos energy on arrival contradict that reading.

In a paper posted Saturday on the same website as the OPERA results, http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.3763v2, the ICARUS team says their findings "refute a superluminal (faster than light) interpretation of the OPERA result."

more

http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre7aj0zx-us-neutrinos/

[shireen]

1. i'm shocked. Just shocked.

:sarcasm:

[MineralMan]

2. Oopsie! My bad. Never mind.

That's what their official report said, I understand.

[Cirque du So-What]

3. I've been waiting for this shoe to drop...now here it is

Good that it's finally been debunked experimentally. Einstein breathes a sigh of relief.

[enlightenment]

4. As a true scholar and scientist, I suspect Einstein might

have been disappointed.

Science progresses and eventually paradigms shift. Suggesting he would be happy would be akin to saying that he was sad the heliocentric model was debunked.

[Cirque du So-What]

5. Perhaps the paradigm is finished shifting

and Einstein's theory of special relativity will stand the test of time - eventually becoming codified into scientific law like Newtonian physics. Haven't seen much in the way of paradigm-shifting going on there for quite awhile. Perhaps Einstein got it right in the first place. Even though much remains to be learned, especially in the field of subatomic particles (and let's not forget the venerable G.U.T., for that matter), but I predict that the luminal speed limit will never be broken.

[enlightenment]

7. Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Time will tell.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. I don't think you can say it's been "debunked experimentally"

This is putting up another measurement they expected to see, but haven't. It raises another question that would need to be answered, probably by overturning more of the current theories; but this does not change the measurements of time or distance, so does not change the apparent experimental results of faster-than-light travel.

[bananas]

8. This story is a month old

It was discussed by bloggers on Oct 20:

http://arxiv.org/tb/1110.3763

Trackbacks for 1110.3763

A Bet Concerning Neutrinos (Part 3) « Azimuth (Azimuth @ johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2...) (trackback posted Thu Oct 20 21:07:37 2011)

Faster-than-Light Neutrinos: Case Not Closed Yet (Quantum Diaries @ www.quantumdiaries.org/2011) (trackback posted Thu Oct 20 21:08:05 2011)

ICARUS Refutes Opera's Superluminal Neutrinos (A Quantum Diaries Survivor @ www.science20.com/quantum_diar...) (trackback posted Thu Oct 20 21:22:00 2011)

Das war es dann für überlichtschnelle Neutrinos (Diax's Rake @ www.scienceblogs.de/diaxs-rake) (trackback posted Sun Oct 23 13:45:43 2011)

OPERA neutrino experiment papers hit the Web (Physics Today News Picks @ blogs.physicstoday.org/newspic...) (trackback posted Tue Oct 25 15:57:10 2011)

Relativity-9: The importance of corroborating evidence in science (Mano Singham's Web Journal @ blog.case.edu/singham) (trackback posted Thu Oct 27 09:09:06 2011)

[bananas]

9. Dorigo's "very simple and definitive" post was on Oct 18

The article in the OP says:

http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre7aj0zx-us-neutrinos/

Physicist Tomasso Dorigo, who works at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and the U.S. Fermilab near Chicago, said in a post on the website Scientific Blogging that the ICARUS paper was "very simple and definitive."

But Dorigo wrote that on Oct 18:

http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/icarus_refutes_operas_superluminal_neutrinos-83684

ICARUS Refutes Opera's Superluminal Neutrinos
By Tommaso Dorigo | October 18th 2011 04:34 AM | 94 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments

The saga of the superluminal neutrinos took a dramatic turn today, with the publication of a very simple yet definitive study by ICARUS, another neutrino experiment at the Gran Sasso Laboratories, who has looked at the neutrinos shot from CERN since 2010.

<snip>

Why is this old news story being recycled?