Einstein is rolling over in His Grave, or Cern makes a big mistake

A parsec is a unit of distance, not time. Solo was not referring directly to his ship's speed when he made this claim. Instead, he was referring to the shorter route he was able to travel by skirting the nearby Maw black hole cluster, thus making the run in under the standard distance. By moving closer to the black holes, Solo managed to cut the distance down to about 11.5 parsecs. Or so his story goes. source

CERN is one of the best physics groups in the world. Their scientific discipline is top shelf. What I find interesting is that after reaching their (tentative) conclusion they held off an announcement for several months to re-check their data, their equipment and their protocols looking for any possible error. They found none.This does not mean that some kind of error has not been made, but I wouldn't bet the farm on that. These guys do not make those kinds of mistakes without finding them in review. Usually. I must, tentatively, assume the phenomenon they reported is real.A repeat by OPERA and duplication by FermiLab and/or KEK/Tsukuba would not be a major surprise.But Relativity will not be overthrown. All the hype on the internet and in the media about the end of Relativity is ignorance in play and those familiar enough with Relativity know very well why.Resolving the conflict here is going to very interesting.

The speed of light has been measured to an exceptional degree and is not an issue with this OPERA result. The issue is how can we have measured a massive particle as traveling faster than light speed. This is a clear violation of Relativity.We can so accurately measure the speed of light because we can generate a single photon in our generator and confidently detect that photon on the other end of the experiment. We cannot do that with neutrinos.A neutrino is so small and light (almost, but not quite, massless) that it barely interacts with anything, ever. We cannot tell if we have generated a single neutrino and the confidence level is pretty high that at the other end we will most probably not be able to detect it. So we have to run these types of experiments using massive numbers of neutrinos generated and detected in pulses of literally millions of particles.The way CERN generates neutrinos is by slamming millions of high energy protons into millions of atoms generating millions of masons that decay into millions of neutrinos (OK, so they are actually anti-neutrinos but that is beyond the detail level I'm working in here). The point here is that these things are generated and detected in powerful short pulses comprised of millions of particles.Nothing in this universe is perfect. The mas (energy) of a proton has been measured at 1.672621777(74)10⁻²⁷ kg (about .938 GeV). Note the (74) in this measurement. That is the error bar. Some protons may be slightly more massive, some less so, than the mean measurement. The neutrino mass is given as less than 3x10^-36 kg (about 2 eV). We cannot yet be certain how much less then 2 eV in mass the various flavors of neutrino are but we can be sure that, as with everything else, it will vary across some (very small) range.The high energy protons generated by CERN (or anywhere) will be generated over a range of masses. The masses of the resultant pulse of protons will form a bell curve with very narrow arms and a steep high peak at the mean value. Most of the generated protons would have measured mass clustered very close to the mean with a few (100,000s?) of slightly greater and slightly lesser mass within the narrow arms around the mean value.Similarly, the timing of proton generation will vary. So we will have another bell curve where most of the protons in the pulse are generated around a specific mean time with a few (100,000s?) generated ever so slightly earlier and ever so slightly later.Now to speculate on the OPERA results. And, yes, admittedly, with the view that Relativity is preserved.There are three (3) speculations that may be at work here.1. There may be a correlation between the (slightly) increased mass (energy) of a generated proton and a (slightly) increased mass (energy) of the neutrino generated by that specific proton collision.2. There may be a correlation between (slightly) higher proton mass and its (slightly) earlier release from the proton generator.These two (2) speculations could mean that higher energy protons would be at the leading edge of the proton pulse and thus higher energy neutrinos at the leading edge of the resulting neutrino pulse as they reach the OPERA detectors.In 2006 MINOS/FermiLab saw a similar faster-then-'c' result, though, unlike OPERA, the MINOS error bars overlapped 'c' so the results were inconclusive.Both the OPERA/CERN and the prior MINOS/FermiLab experiments used polystyrene scintillators as the active neutrino detectors.3. There may be a bias in polystyrene scintillators that detect (slightly) higher energy neutrinos only (and very few of those anyway).Again, this is all speculation. But (big) if these speculations are correct then the MINOS and OPERA results can be accounted for within the restrictions of Relativity. Considering the CERN pulses were 10,000 nanoseconds long, a 60 nanosecond differential from generated time peak (mean value) at CERN to the expected detection peak (mean value) at OPERA, is well within the scope of these speculations.Edited by AZPaul3, : correction

Photons (EM) are massless particles. Neutrinos are not massless. Their mass is so slight however that they do not (often) interact with anything.But they do have mass and as such are restricted by Relativity to less than 'c' velocities.

At the present time, with our technology, I do not see any way to make this test.Detecting only a few thousand of the trillions of neutrinos generated does not give enough data to make a meaningful comparison. I'm also not so sure we can test the initial proton generator to determine the starting curve. Also, since the only results we can presently achieve are aggregate results we cannot know the spread we are dealing with. We cannot detect single neutrinos and know their mass. We can only aggregate the (very few) detections with respect to time. And a bias in generation and/or detection, presently unknowable given our technology, could produce the aggregate data reported.Edited by AZPaul3, : clarifyEdited by AZPaul3, : more

good points. Thank you.

For rest mass, yes, I agree, but, E=mc² so a spread in energy = a spread in mass. If the three speculations are correct then- the more energetic (massive) protons will be at the leading edge of the proton pulse.
- the more energetic (massive) neutrinos will be at the leading edge of the neutrino pulse.
- the leading edge of the pulse is (slightly) prior to the mean time value which is used in the calculations.
- the polystyrene scintillators will only detect the more energetic (massive) neutrinos at the leading edge of the pulse.The expected arrival time calculations are made based on the mean time value of the departure pulse, when infact (if this speculation is correct) the only neutrinos detected were at the leading edge of that pulse (slightly) prior to the mean time value given for the departure. Nothing superluminal here.If we could time individual neutrinos the same as we can photons then we would expect to find a velocity < c. But since this cannot be done and we must time pulses of millions of particles, the speculation is that the spread of mass (energy) values, correlated with a spread of departure time values, may appear to show the differential reported by OPERA.

Way to go Opus! ... eh ... Percy!I think you are right. Something like this is quite likely the answer. In the mean time we could be entertained with causality jokes.Maybe we could get 1.61803 to start with one.

Mundane, nothing. This is elegant. Simple, beautiful.It turns the OPERA experiment and its physics defying hype into another proof of Relativity. Gotta love the irony.