Finding Puts Brakes on Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos

[n2doc]

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazine

The claim that neutrinos can travel faster than light has been given a knock by an independent experiment.

On 17 October, the Imaging Cosmic and Rare Underground Signals (ICARUS) collaboration submitted a paper to the preprint server arXiv.org, in which it offered a rebuttal of claims to have clocked subatomic particles called neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. The original results were published on 22 September by the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus (OPERA) experiment.

Both experiments are based at Gran Sasso National Laboratory near L'Aquila, Italy, and detect neutrinos coming in a beam from CERN, Europe's high-energy particle physics laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland, about 730 kilometers away. Unlike OPERA, ICARUS does not measure the neutrinos' speed directly. Instead, it has shown that the energy spectrum of the neutrinos does not exhibit an effect predicted last month by Andrew Cohen and Sheldon Glashow, theoretical physicists at Boston University in Massachusetts.

If the Cohen-Glashow effect is a valid prediction, "neutrinos are not superluminal," says Sandro Centro, a physicist at the University of Padua in Italy, deputy spokesman for ICARUS and a co-author of the latest paper.


more

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=finding-halts-faster-than-light-neutrinos

[laconicsax]

1. What do you know...Einstein was right, Tesla was still wrong, and we've still made progress.

[entropic]

2. no it doesn't

This hinges on a theoretical effect. OPERA data is an observation. Observation trumps theory until another observation shows otherwise. Which is what we're waiting for.

[bananas]

3. ICARUS Proves Neutrinos At Least 10 Times Faster Than Light

http://www.science20.com/alpha_meme/icarus_proves_neutrinos_least_10_times_faster_light-83704

ICARUS Proves Neutrinos At Least 10 Times Faster Than Light
By Sascha Vongehr | October 18th 2011 09:56 AM | 21 comments

<snip>

OR WAIT A MINUTE !

Does ICARUS actually prove this exact interpretation? No, it does not necessarily prove this exact interpretation (though what I wrote above is a possible interpretation of the results!). But my headline and write up above is no more dramatic hype than “ICARUS Refutes Opera's Superluminal Neutrinos”, another article here on Science2.0. ICARUS indeed proves neither the one nor the other.

Why do we have such silly headlines on Science sites that aim for more credibility than the mainstream media especially when it comes to science then? Every new result that can be distorted into supporting establishment consensus is now hyped, as was already pointed out by Chad Orzel with “Experimentalists aren't Idiots” when another one a few days ago “proved” OPERA did not know how to use GPS (which may turn out true, but why this biased hype in favor of one certain interpretation while anything unwanted gets dismissed out of hand?).

Notice: It is not the mainstream media, it is scientists directly who hype! Not a political party, not FOX news, not Exxon or Pfizer, but here it is clearly scientists who claim they have public outreach in mind yet hype with spittle dripping from their mouths.

Science Wars

Not the media – the social structure of science is to blame for the deep crises that science is in and the justified and growing distrust that science meets, the ease with which pseudo-science sells in the public and scores in academia. We need to seriously start this discussion. I have contributed many times, also recently here warning that the neutrino saga will be used to doubt global warming, which is precisely what happened a few days after. Yet I still get only knee jerk reflex dismissal hitting under the belt.

<snip>

[caraher]

4. I'm surprised that people are surprised that scientists hype their own views

I think we'd be much better off not teaching an ivory-tower "objective" above-the-fray myth about scientists. Scientific method is something else that's way overblown; it has a certain usefulness as a myth illustrating model behavior, but rarely does research progress in the kind of algorithmic step-by-step leading to the Truth fashion usually depicted.

Perhaps what's new to people is that with arXiv and blogs it's a lot easier to hear scientists jockey for position, attack one another, etc. Scientists are no worse-behaved now than ever before. Putting faith in science as a process is very different from imagining that individual scientists possess some greater wisdom. It takes time for the filtering process to weed the bad results and crummy theories out, and this chaotic, often self-serving back-and-forth is the filter in action. Over time, once we figure out how to ask the right questions, nature lets us know who was right and who was wrong; but in the meantime we have this glorious confusion - the state of NOT knowing that is the precursor of every big discovery (as well as many more non-discoveries).