The first is by Carlo
Contaldi of Imperial College London. He says that it’s likely the OPERA
team failed to take gravity into their math equations and its effect on
the clocks used to time the experiment. This because the degree of
gravity at the two stations involved in the experiment (Gran Sasso
National Laboratory in Italy and the CERN facility in Geneva) were
different, thus one of the clocks would have been running slightly
faster than the other, resulting in faulty timing. If this turns out to
be the case, the OPERA team will most certainly be embarrassed to have
overlooked such a basic problem with their study.
Schematic view of the Opera Detector
The second is by Andrew Cohen and Sheldon Glashow, who together point out that if the neutrinos
in the study were in fact traveling as fast as claimed, they should
have been radiating particles as they went, leaving behind a measurable
trail; this due to the energy transfer that would occur between
particles moving at different speeds. And since the OPERA team didn’t
observe any such trail (or at least didn’t report it) it follows that
the neutrinos weren’t in fact traveling as fast as were claimed and the
resultant speed measurements would have to be attributed to something
else.
Neither of these papers actually disproves the results found by the
OPERA team of course, the first merely suggests there may be a problem
with the way the measurements were taken, the second takes more of a “it
can’t be true because of…” approach which only highlight the general
disbelief in the physics community regarding the very possibility of
anything, much less the speed of neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light,
messing with Einstein’s most basic theories. The first can be addressed
rather easily by the OPERA team if it so desires, and the second, well,
if the neutrinos did in fact travel faster than the speed of light and
did so without leaving a trail, a lot of physics theory will have to be
rethought. Though that may not necessarily be a bad thing, physics is
supposed to be about finding answers to explain the natural world around
us after all, even if it means going back to the drawing board now and
then.
From physorg
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