[Vision2020] Nutrinos not faster than light?

[Ron Force]

There was a young woman named Bright
Who traveled much faster than light
She departed today, in a relative way
And arrived on the previous night.

 
Ron Force
Moscow Idaho USA


________________________________
From: Ted Moffett <starbliss at gmail.com>
To: Ron Force <rforce2003 at yahoo.com>
Cc: "vision2020 at moscow.com" <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Sent: Saturday, October 15, 2011 12:59 PM
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Nutrinos not faster than light?

"If it stands up, this episode will be laden with irony. Far from
breaking Einstein's theory of relatively, the faster-than-light
measurement will turn out to be another confirmation of it."
------------------
This explanation is a disapointment, even if true...

I was hoping something more exotic would be confirmed, like string
theory predictions of other dimensions, as mentioned in the article
below.  This would not exactly totally refute Einstein's relativity,
from my understanding, but would indicate relativity is an incomplete
theory to describe the universe, which it probably is...

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/0922/Neutrino-particle-traveling-faster-than-light-Two-ways-it-could-rewrite-physics

Neutrino particle traveling faster than light? Two ways it could
rewrite physics.

One example is string theory, which posits a universe of many more
dimensions than the four humans experience.

"If you have a theory in which there is more than one way to get from
A to B, maybe you can have a shortcut and have the appearance of
traveling faster than the speed of light," says Stephen Parke, who
heads the theoretical physics department at the Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill.

The alternative? A pillar of modern physics – Einstein's theory of
special relativity, in which the speed of light is a particle's
absolute speed limit – could take its first serious hit. Perhaps not
flat wrong, but only a piece of a more complete picture.
------------------------------------------
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett

On 10/15/11, Ron Force <rforce2003 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27260/?ref=rss
>
>
> It's now been three weeks since the extraordinary news that neutrinos
> travelling between France and Italy had been clocked moving faster than
> light. The experiment, known as OPERA, found that the particles
> produced at CERN near Geneva arrived at the Gran Sasso Laboratory in
> Italy some 60 nanoseconds earlier than the speed of light allows.
> The result has sent a ripple of excitement through the physics
> community. Since then, more than 80 papers have appeared on the arXiv
> attempting to debunk or explain the effect. It's fair to say, however,
> that the general feeling is that the OPERA team must have overlooked
> something.
> Today, Ronald van Elburg at the University of Groningen in the
> Netherlands makes a convincing argument that he has found the error.
> First, let's review the experiment, which is simple in concept: a
> measurement of distance and time.
> The distance is straightforward. The location of neutrino production
> at CERN is fairly easy to measure using GPS. The position of the Gran
> Sasso Laboratory is harder to pin down because it sits under a
> kilometre-high mountain. Nevertheless, the OPERA team says it has nailed the
> distance of 730 km to within 20 cm or so.
> The time of neutrino flight is harder to measure. The OPERA team says it can
> accurately gauge the instant when the neutrinos are created and
> the instant they are detected using clocks at each end.
> But the tricky part is keeping the clocks at either end exactly
> synchronised. The team does this using GPS satellites, which each
> broadcast a highly accurate time signal from orbit some 20,000km
> overhead. That introduces a number of extra complications which the team has
> to take into account, such as the time of travel of the GPS signals to the
> ground.
> But van Elburg says there is one effect that the OPERA team seems to have
> overlooked: the relativistic motion of the GPS clocks.
> It's easy to think that the motion of the satellites is irrelevant.
> After all, the radio waves carrying the time signal must travel at the
> speed of light, regardless of the satellites' speed.
> But there is an additional subtlety. Although the speed of light is
> does not depend on the the frame of reference, the time of flight does.
> In this case, there are two frames of reference: the experiment on the
> ground and the clocks in orbit. If these are moving relative to each
> other, then this needs to be factored in.
> So what is the satellites' motion with respect to the OPERA
> experiment? These probes orbit from West to East in a plane inclined at
> 55 degrees to the equator. Significantly, that's roughly in line with
> the neutrino flight path. Their relative motion is then easy to
> calculate.
> So 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.
> By this he means shorter than the distance measured in the reference frame
> on the ground.
> The OPERA team overlooks this because it thinks of the clocks as on the
> ground not in orbit.
> How big is this effect? Van Elburg calculates that it should cause
> the neutrinos to arrive 32 nanoseconds early. But this must be doubled
> because the same error occurs at each end of the experiment. So the
> total correction is 64 nanoseconds, almost exactly what the OPERA team
> observes.
> That's impressive but it's not to say the problem is done and dusted. Peer
> review is an essential part of the scientific process and this
> argument must hold its own under scrutiny from the community at large
> and the OPERA team in particular.
> If it stands up, this episode will be laden with irony. Far from
> breaking Einstein's theory of relatively, the faster-than-light
> measurement will turn out to be another confirmation of it.
> Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1110.2685: Times Of Flight Between A Source And A
> Detector Observed From A GPS Satellite.
>
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