Wind aided obv.

Guys,

They figured out this was a simple mistake after they went back and did some follow up interviews. Turns out the guy who was holding the stopwatch said he thinks he might have clicked it "a little too fast."

what was the actual point of the experiment? Was it actually to see if they could get neutrinos to travel faster than light? Just seems weird that you would try that, given that everyone is so incredilious about it being possible, and then when it does happen not wanting to make it public for fear its just some error. Or were they doing something else, and it just happened?

read they were doing something else, and it just something they noticed. what that something else was, i can't exactly remember, but can prob be found through alil bit of reserach. (think it had something to do w/ the neutrinos decaying into different types of neutrinos...)

edit: from wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laborat...del_Gran_Sasso

I assume something else, it usually is. Forgive me for the presumptuousness of my answer.

The previous post had it right - they were looking for neutrino oscillations. Because those take a little while to happen and they're traveling at basically light speed, they need a widely separated detector and source. Once they've got that set up, measuring time of flight seems like not only natural but essential - it would be a good check to make sure that the signals they measured are actually coming from the original source and not some weird background.

It seems very much essential. How could they know which neutrino's they were detecting otherwise as you have alluded to?

I wonder how they measure oscillations, as a fraction of different flavours at source vs detector?

I am thoroughly intrigued now and feel the need to read up on this .

Not my specialty, but from what I've seen they produce only one kind at the source, and so detecting any of the other kind constitutes an oscillation. Given what I've seen about their measurements, it's a pretty low probability event. I do not know how they detect them - perhaps they produce new versions of the particles they originally decayed from?

Did they think about the fact that it would take longer to travel a curved surface rather than a straight line?

They produce a pure muon neutrino beam, so a detection of a tau neutrino
means that an osciallation occured. When the tau neutrino interacts with the nucleii of the Opera detector, a tau lepton is produced, which is subsequently
detected.

The probability for this oscillation is very low. Up to know Opera has detected one tau candidate, while it has detected more than 16000 muon neutrinos.

When they interact they'll produce a tau or an electron when they were initially created from a muon interaction.

Essentially, there is a 'conservation' of tau/electron/muon number, so when one of them is involved in an interaction and annihilated and a neutrino is made in it's place, then that neutrino will have that particular flavor. When that neutrino interacts with another particle and creates something else detectable, it will produce a particle of the flavor it was initially, if no oscillation occurred.

That is:

creation might be muon->decays into electron, anti (electron) neutrino and muon neutrino. Electron number and muon number conserved.

That muon neutrino may interact with another electron and cause the following 'reaction': (or something like this...)

muon neutrino + electron -> electron neutrino + muon. Again, conserving muon and electron number.

Tau number is also conserved. We know the beam of neutrinos was all muon and anti-electron neutrinos, and no tau. So, if we see tau particles being created (??? + electron -> electron neutrino + tau), we know the ??? must have been a tau neutrino. But none of those were initially created, so if we see a tau, we "know" it "must have changed" from a muon. In other words, the muon neutrino must have somehow changed into a tau neutrino.

(Of course, there's a violation of the muon/tau number in that oscillation, but...)

At a party over the weekend I was told by a reliable source that this group has a track record of making somewhat iffy, publicity-seeking claims, and that their funding was running out and they were under pressure to come up with something.

[ ] Reliable

Sick party.

Maybe they need a C as well as a c?

Scientist: The results are in from the test. Neutrinos won the race against light in a vacuum.

2+2: But how much velocity did they lose?

Scientist: facepalm.jpg

yeah I am sure this has been addressed but maybe c is just (0.999999999999)n where n is the speed of these neutrinos which have the same speed in all reference frames blah blah etc? light cones get titled ever-so-slightly but you still can't send signals to the past.

Oh sure, but that's not what you said tomorrow.

Yeah, something like this would be reasonable to build. But it is still a huge deal as it is a violation of Lorentz invariance, which has been pretty iron clad for 100 years. It's also really hard to bend without totally destroying.

How do they detect the passage of the nuetrinos?

neutrino detector, ldo

suck it, light

holy internet allusionments.

I'm seriously interested in how.

Wiki lists some ways of detecting that nuetrinos have interacted w/ something but a quick read doesn't reveal anything that would be accurate.

This page

http://www.physorg.com/tags/neutrino+detector/

doesn't reveal a very precise nuetrino detector.

So how did they manage to detect the nuertinos passage to w/i nanoseconds?

I'm not saying they couldn't I'm just wondering how they did it.

So does that mean somewhere around the year 2500 we might have warp drives or personal time warp pods setup in every house hold?

It's fun to think about this stuff but I guess I'm just jealous that we'll never have anything like this in our life time.