The End of Story of Faster Than Light Neutrinos?

Recently some possible explanations of the faster than light neutrinos were announced. And guess what, after all of these mind blowing speculations of neutrinos travelling through other dimensions or Einstein's theories being wrong it's likely that all of this fuss was basically due to a flawed cable.

So there are two likely explanations - one is basically that one of the cables had a flawed connection, which caused a slight discrepancy, while other explanation is that a timing instrument called an oscillator had a problem.
as CERN press officer Arnaud Marsollier said, the flawed cable connection could account for the 60 microsecond difference between the measured neutrino speed and the speed of light. Although further tests will be needed to fully confirm the explanation, it's the most likely explanation we have.

So I don't know what you think about this guys, but I'm quite happy that the experiment was not confirmed and Einstein's theories still hold. I think we already have too much unsolved questions in the world of physics these days so the fall of Einstein's theories would simply be too much.

  

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Significant Progress at LHC!

In the seminar back at 12th of December held at CERN presented the current results of the search of Higgs boson. The great news was that some significant progress was made. Yet Higgs boson is still not found, let's check out what's  the latest progress update from CERN is all about.

The main conclusion of the seminar was that the most likely mass ranges of Higgs was discovered to be 116-130 GeV  and  115-127 GeV. What is even more amazing that huge hints of Higgs were detected in the latter mass region, yet it's still too weak to confirm the discovery of the particle.

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Here's a qoute from the press release:

"We have restricted the most likely mass region for the Higgs boson to 116-130 GeV, and over the last few weeks we have started to see an intriguing excess of events in the mass range around 125 GeV," explained ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti."This excess may be due to a fluctuation, but it could also be something more interesting. We cannot conclude anything at this stage. We need more study and more data. Given the outstanding performance of the LHC this year, we will not need to wait long for enough data and can look forward to resolving this puzzle in 2012."
"We cannot exclude the presence of the Standard Model Higgs between 115 and 127 GeV because of a modest excess of events in this mass region that appears, quite consistently, in five independent channels," explained CMS experiment Spokesperson, Guido Tonelli. "The excess is most compatible with a Standard Model Higgs in the vicinity of 124 GeV and below but the statistical significance is not large enough to say anything conclusive. As of today what we see is consistent either with a background fluctuation or with the presence of the boson. Refined analyses and additional data delivered in 2012 by this magnificent machine will definitely give an answer."


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Some Explanations for Crazy Neutrinos

So as you all know neutrinos have been behaving in a rather bizarre way these days. And even though thousands of headlines already declared Einstein's theories wrong, in reality more independent tests are needed to confirm the results. So meanwhile let's check out some possible explanations for this strange behaviour of neutrinos.

This pictures illustrates how the experiments were done:

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Perhaps the most famous explanation is that neutrinos might be travel some of the way in another dimension, which enables them to complete the journey faster. This short cut scenario would explain the strange results without challenging relativity. Perhaps the simplest analogy would be travelling between two points on the surface of Earth through a tunnel instead of travelling on the surface. The main problem however is that extra dimensions still belong to the more exotic theories of physics. That is there is no direct proof of any extra dimensions yet. Also, if neutrinos could do something as fancy as extra dimensional travel we should have detected it when observing massive supernova explosions, which enable quite accurate predictions of the speed of neutrinos. However, no such faster than light travel was ever detected.

Of course there are scientists who think that neutrinos have indeed travelled faster than light. However, according to physicist Sheldon Glashow, if neutrinos were indeed travelling faster than light in vacuum, they would radiate electron-positron pairs and would simply lose energy. This change in energy would be noticeable in the OPERA experiment, however no energy loss was detected. So this means that there simply is some kind of systematic error or that something really bizarre is going on.

So the other possible explanation might be some kind of unknown factor, which messes up the experiment and gives faster than light results. After the famous results were published, scientists were flooded by emails asking whether they included rotation of the Earth, general relativity, continental drift and other similar factors to their calculations. So far it seems that everything was included, as even the second experiment gave positive results that neutrinos travelled faster than they should. Yet, one of the newest explanations says that the anomaly in the speed of the particles could be explained having in mind that satellites were used to accurately determine the distance between Cern and Gran Sasso. And since the satellites where moving relatively to the observers on Earth, the calculations should be slightly different, which could give a change in the results of about 64 ns., which is very close to the result found in the experiments.

So even though there are many great as well as crazy explanations all of them have to be examined and checked. It will take long and hard work to test all of this, but as history shows, every great revolution in science starts with a crisis.

Also some guys sent me this crazy video. It's a song about neutrinos and it's so cheeeeeeesy. Actually, it's one of the strangest songs I've seen, but check it out :D

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More on Faster than Light Neutrinos

So as the problem of the faster than light neutrinos at the OPERA experiment at CERN is still hot, let's check out this video about the physics behind detecting neutrinos and other strange but interesting stuff regarding the famous discovery at Gran Sasso.

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Faster than Light Neutrinos and Other Crazy Stuff...

So if you're wondering what the hell is going on in CERN these days here's the answer. Check out these great videos about what the hell those crazy neutrinos have been up to.

And some more insights from Brian Cox:

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So What's Going on at Cern Lately?

So we already know that guys at the LHC haven't found the Higgs boson yet, but what's going on at Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider?

Well, since Cern is home of the biggest particle smasher in the world it's natural that there's a lot of fuzz going on there right now. Recently scientists working at Cern announced baffling results, which appeared during one of the experiments in the Gran Sasso laboratory.

So what they did was basically sent some neutrinos from Cern to Gran Sasso laboratory, which is 732 km. away. The interesting part is that they detected neutrinos coming to the lab a fraction of a second earlier than they should. The calculations of the speed revealed that neutrinos must have covered the distance in a faster-than-light speed.

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For those of you who don't remember high school physics, light speed at vacuum is one of the most important and well tested constants in science. For more than a hundred years scientists tested  the speed of light and found it to be constant.

"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," said Antonio Ereditato, who was working on the experiment.

Only more independent experiments, which would find the same anomaly would give great evidence that light speed limit is different. However, having in mind that similar anomalies were always resorted, I would bet my money that light speed limit will not be broken.

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