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

I may be missing something here, but it seems to me that the proposed solution (a different inertial frame) is whoppingly insufficient to explain the order of magnitude of the measured neutrino's time-of-flight deviation from c (the speed of light).Consider: The relative speed of a GPS satellite (orbiting at 26,600 km from the center of the earth) vs the ground emitter & detector apparatus would be no more than 3410 meters per second. The associated relativistic length contraction of the distance between the emitter and detector (from 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)) would be no greater than 1 part in 1.6*10^10, which nets about 47 micrometers shorter over the 732 kilometers separation. The measured discrepancy (60 nanoseconds) corresponds to a difference of 18 meters, which is about 400,000 times (5 and a half orders of magnitude) of that which can be attributed to special relativity.Like I said, I may be missing something here.

Doing so now; thanks for the reference! I was under the impression that GPS calculations are routinely pre-compensated for the effects (or at least first-order effects) of both general relativity and special relativity. According to Wikipedia, the probable cumulative uncompensated errors is on the order of 5 to 7 meters for civilian GPS, well within the 18 meter length-of-flight discrepancy. {A side note: Would CERN necessarily be limited to just civilian GPS, as opposed to double-checking with military GPS or alternative satellite positioning systems?}Anyway, the v/c method is clearly related to the restriction of one-way measurements of the speed of light, which itself is problematic in terms of synchronizing one's clocks. An obvious follow-up to rule out superluminal speeds (c + epsilon) would be to test neutrino time-of-flight in the opposite direction, which, if R. Elburg is correct, would (falsly) appear as sublight velocity of the same order of magnitude (namely, c - epsilon).

And here we go again, Percy. Granted, the article by Tom Levenson is very well-written and is a testament to the scientific method helping to lead science to viable solutions to problems. All of this is not in question.It appears that Tom Levenson is yet another person who has (provisionally, to his credit) boarded the bandwagon proclaiming that Ronald A.J. van Elburg has offered the correct explanation of the observed neutrino time-of-flight discrepancy via special relativity. In doing this, he seemed to have leapt to the same initial misconception that I had:

quote:

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When one object is in motion, travelling in a different reference frame than some measuring apparatus, then special relativity comes into play. As the TechReview’s Physics ArXiv blog describes the issue, this means

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[that] from the point of view of a clock on board a GPS satellite, the positions of the neutrino source and detector are changing. From the perspective of the clock, the detector is moving towards the source and consequently the distance travelled by the particles as observed from the clock is shorter, says van Elburg.

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The correction needed to account for this relativistic shrinking of the path as seen from the point of view of the measuring device in space is almost exactly the same size as the seeming excess speed of the neutrinos the OPERA team believes they’ve detected. And that would mean that

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far from breaking Einstein’s theory of relatively, the faster-than-light measurement will turn out to be another confirmation of it.

{highlighted for emphasis}

  —Tom Levenson

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... namely, that relativistic length contraction of the path (as seen from the inertial frame of the orbiting GPS satellite) explains the discrepancy. This is not the case here, as can be easily checked as I have done in Message 47; but it seems to be becoming more widely accepted solely on the basis of the overall perceived weirdness of Einsteinian relativity by the general public. By uncritically using the Argument ad Einsteinum, Tom Levenson may have unwittingly contributed to the public confusion.From what I can gather, Elburg's explanation is actually based on the fact that (as seen from the frame of the moving satellite) the detector is moving towards the position that the emitter had (at the time of emission) during the time that the neutrino is in flight; look up Einstein's moving train gedankenexperiment for the basics.This first-order effect (due to the fact that the observed speed of light is the same in all inertial frames, leading to the observed assynchronity of two separated moving clocks which are synchronized in their own frame) is very easy to calculate without going into the second-order effects of relativistic length contraction. For any particle going at exactly the speed of light (including photons), this would account for about 30 nanoseconds, or approximately half of the measured discrepancy, assuming that this wasn't already somehow accounted for by CERN in the first place.