OPERA, meet ICARUS…and ICARUS says that the notion of faster than light neutrinos are nothing more than a Greek tragedy.
The first team, members of the OPERA experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory south of Rome, said they recorded neutrinos beamed to them from the CERN research centre in Switzerland as arriving 60 nanoseconds before light would have done.
But ICARUS, another experiment at Gran Sasso — which is deep under mountains and run by Italy’s National Institute of National Physics — now argues that their measurements of the neutrinos energy on arrival contradict that reading.
In a paper posted on Saturday on the same website as the OPERA results, arxiv.org/abs/1110.3763v2, the ICARUS team says their findings “refute a superluminal (faster than light) interpretation of the OPERA result.”
They argue, on the basis of recently published studies by two top U.S. physicists, that the neutrinos pumped down from CERN, near Geneva, should have lost most of their energy if they had travelled at even a tiny fraction faster than light.
But in fact, the ICARUS scientists say, the neutrino beam as tested in their equipment registered an energy spectrum fully corresponding with what it should be for particles travelling at the speed of light and no more.
Physicist Tomasso Dorigo, who works at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, and the U.S. Fermilab near Chicago, said in a post on the website Scientific Blogging that the ICARUS paper was “very simple and definitive.”
Bottom line: breaking the FTL barrier requires serious juice, and ICARUS argues that the neutrinos came though with normal energy readings. Still not a particle physicist or anything, but it’s not like confirmation bias isn’t a problem in science, that why you go for reproducible results. ICARUS says the energy numbers don’t add up, and that’s a pretty valid concern if you ask me.
And yeah, this is starting to bring to mind the whole cold fusion mess from ’89.
gnomedad
That’s not the way I’ve been reading it. More like the researchers who found this said “we know this is nuts, but we can’t figure out what’s wrong … please help.” They weren’t touting a claim, they were making their dirty laundry public. That’s not the way cold fusion went down. I think this is a great public showcasing of the “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence” principle. Not that the climate change deniers will learn anything from it.
CJ in MPLS
Interestingly, the contradictory results don’t disprove the earlier results, but they do point out why more work is necessary. I’d agree that this may well be the newest form of cold fusion, but there is still hope for a warp drive . . .
gene108
Any relation to the American Dodgeball Association of America?
John Weiss
A small but, so far, a verified violation of Einstein’s theory. Oh, my! So the place where we live might be weirder than we can imagine!
We knew that didn’t we?
Face
CERN, OPERA, ICARUS, IDONTCARUS. Acronym overload FAIL. There’s a reason Joe Dumbass glosses over this stuff and just believes whatever Fox tells him to believe.
Jay C
Not to me, either (what gnomedad said @ #1): CERN seems, in this case, to have publicized an anomalous result (FTL neutrinos) for a carefully monitored experiment, and pretty much challenged the rest of the scientific community to either confirm or refute the results. Of course, given that the equipment needed to duplicate the CERN neutrino experiments only exists at CERN/Gran Sasso, that’s pretty difficult to do…
BGinCHI
Until Newt Gingrich weighs in on this I’ll just hold fire.
I’d also think that if those particle accelerators were cleaned regularly by some lazy elementary school kids this kind of error wouldn’t creep into the measurements.
Dustin
So basically this team’s argument is that, even though the superluminal velocity results have been retested and got the same result, their energy isn’t high enough to have done what the tests say they did?
Anyone else get a “who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes” moment here? I’m all for verification and think they’re likely missing something (otherwise we’d be seeing neutrino spikes from supernova years before we do, for example), but this whole line of thinking seems strained. And quite frankly I’m going to take experimental evidence over an equation any day, because the whole question here is if these results show a flaw in our equations.
Anonymous At Work
Nah, cold fusion was, in the end, about perpetuating scientific fraud. This seems like a miscalculation that will be argued over and the tests redone. Cold fusion had immediate commercial applications whereas FTL technology does not. Hence, less incentive to doctor the data.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Face: Acronyms have nothing to do with it. The military has acronyms for the places their military bases are located. The reason Joe Dumbass glosses over this stuff is because he doesn’t want to think, a problem with the majority of Americans.
@John Weiss: It hasn’t been verified yet.
I was in college as a physics student during the cold fusion news. It was interesting wathing my professors attempt to recreate the cold fusion results, and ultimately rewarding watching it not work. I learned a lot about how it is just as important in science that something fails to work as when it does work.
Mike G
This, of course, good news for John McCain.
why you go for reproducible results
Note to all the magical-thinking, Jeebus-rode-a-dinosaur-to-church knuckle draggers: this is the essence of science. It’s not about “This old book said it according to me, you will believe it and obey it without question or you’re going to hell.” This is how civilization advances.
bottyguy
I don’t see how this is anywhere close to the Cold Fusion mess. There are no institutes for faster than light study being set up in Italy or elsewhere to monetize the finding based on one paper.
Also it seems like science is doing everything right here. There was a cutting edge experiment that didn’t agree with theory, so it is being investigated by many labs to determine if it can be reproduced. It is likely that the results won’t stand, but that’s the way science bounces.
The only problem I see is that the news media in this and the Cold Fusion case it too eager to jump on and promote non-reproduced results.
tavella
And yeah, this is starting to bring to mind the whole cold fusion mess from ‘89.
No, this is the scientific process, and I’m kind of annoyed you can’t see that. You find something you can’t explain; you try various things to disprove it, and then you publish the information and say “can anyone else explain this?”
I’m fairly sure it *will* be eventually explained without FTL, but this is what scientists *do* when they are doing good science.
smintheus
@Mike G: For the win.
Seriously though, I never bought the original CERN claim but doesn’t the ICARUS counter-argument have the problem that we cannot measure the mass of neutrinos?
Dustin
@smintheus: That’s the thing, CERN never actually made a “claim”. They put their necks on the line and said “this is odd, what did we do wrong?”. Big difference, and why this question won’t ever fall into the same category as the fraud behind Cold Fusion.
greg
I don’t think ICARUS have figured out what was wrong with the original OPERA experiment or debunked it, or anything of the sort. This paper is just saying: “given what we know, if these particles _had_ been traveling faster than light, their energy should have changed thus-and-so, and they didn’t”.
That’s a statement that standard theory says “if A then B”, but standard theory also says “not A” (you ain’t going faster than light in the first place). So the fact that the OPERA results were “not B” (not changed energy), doesn’t really logically prove anything except that if these results are reproduced then the standard model is wrong.
But if the results are reproduced then we know that already because we have fricken faster than light neutrinos!
terry
@4, like you, Face? Heh.
RossinDetroit
Matt Strassler at Of Particular Significance says ICARUS doesn’t refute OPERA.
RossinDetroit
Here’s a Matt Strassler post that explains the background of the FTL neutrino issue. He proposes some additional analyses of the data and why they would be useful. It’s pretty readable for a particle physics article.
Dave
As someone who has ZERO training in physics… isn’t the only thing that will refute the original results is performing the same experiment multiple times in multiple places and comparing the results? Since the original experiment turns Einstein’s theory on its head, why would you expect the energy spectrum to conform?
LGRooney
@Dustin: That was something of my feeling as well. So, we’ve got an experiment that seems to upend a whole lot of the basis of the physics at hand and now we’re going to argue that because energy levels aren’t lower it didn’t happen? Perhaps that latter assumption is another one of the issues that needs to have its bubble popped so we can come to a better understanding of what did happen? Then again, IANASc, so what do I know?
Warren Terra
I haven’t been following all this closely – I’m generally content to wait for the people who understand more of it to try to wrap their heads around it, and to replicate it – but in the initial flurry of coverage I seem to recall that there was data from a supernova, in which the neutrinos and the visible light arrive at the same time, more or less (the vast distances mean that the small fraction of the speed of light asserted from OPERA would have introduced a detectable time lag for arrival here). Has that been reconciled?
scav
Don’t ya just love it when things get complicated and nobody pretends otherwise? But then, I love acronyms that use acronyms♥ so I’m probably a lost cause.
♥ FIFE: First ISLSCP (International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project) Field Experiment.
Judas Escargot
As others have already pointed out, OPERA has made no specific claim of having ‘broken the light barrier’. They’ve repeatedly made an unexpected measurement, and asked the community to help explain the result. (SCIENCE!). IMO they are definitely measuring something, we just don’t know what that something is, yet. Finding out the answer will lead to either better experiments, or better physics.
As far as the cold fusion fiasco is concerned, that was caused by researchers overeager to claim credit before they really knew what they were measuring (ie, potential $$$), and a science-ignorant press. Cold fusion (now known as ‘Low Energy Nuclear Reactions’) is a real, observable effect that has yet to be explained– use the right combination of metals and you get a little more energy out than you should. The Navy has spent a fair amount of cash on the subject. Free infinite energy source for the 21st century? Probably not. Yet another weird, unexpected effect worth studying to advance our knowledge of physics? Definitely. Interested parties can Google LENR for more.
Post fail.
Barry
@gnomedad: Seconding this – the people seem to be acting like scientists.
Jerzy Russian
Definitely not cold fusion here. The OPERA essentially are
saying “We have beaten the crap out of this, and we cannot
see where we went wrong. Can anyone else figure it out?”
OPERA is a large group, and presumably all of the obvious
explanations have been checked out. At some point you just
have to publish.
This reminds me a bit of the story behind the discovery of
the accelerating universe. Since the results were so
unusual, the astronomers doing the
work initially assumed they made a mistake somewhere.
They went back and checked, and after about 6 months of
checking, started to believe the results. After about a dozen
years the initial results seem to be holding up.
It won’t be easy to have an independent check on the
OPERA results, but there eventually will be. I recall reading
somewhere that there was another facility that could attempt
a similar measurement in a few years time.
I still wonder about the neutrinos from SN 1987A, which
would seem to suggest that neutrinos travel a bit slower
than light.
YoohooCthulhu
I have minimal particle physics background but pretty good experience in parsing scientific arguments, and I’m not sure I buy this strain. This is an indirect measurement at best, and relies on the assumption that neutrinos (which have no measurable mass) behave the same as particles with actual mass. If neutrinos are capable of traveling faster than light, it would seem reasonable that they also might not have the same energy/velocity requirements wrt the cosmological speed limit.
There’s also no inherent reason these energy measurements should be all that more accurate than the velocity measurements (derivative quantity). So if you have to choose between a direct measurement and and indirect measurement with similar accuracy I’d go with the direct one…
The Other Bob
“…breaking the FTL barrier…” Watch Stargate Universe? Made me think of “FTL-Drive”.
RD
@Warren Terra:
The supernova neutrinos were a different type.
Stillwater
I’m not sure I’m convinced. It seems like they’re relying on a claim dependent on existing theory to refute evidence inconsistent with existing theory. I mean, which claim is more central to current theory: C as an upper limit or energy change above C?
Zandar
Tough crowd fail, if you ask me.
Jerzy Russian
@Dave: In the ideal world
you would measure these neutrinos using different techniques
and equipment. If the signal is real, then eventually different
experiments will agree that the signal is there. If the
signal is some artifact of the experiment, then that will also
eventually come to light. In the case of OPERA, very few labs
around the world can perform these types of measurements. This
will make progress slower. The best one can do is to have many
different brains thinking about possible sources of error in the
experimental design and/or data analysis.
ericblair
@Judas Escargot:
Right, and they’ve been very forward with saying that they don’t know what’s going on and need either verification or explanation of the results. It’s not like they’re trying to bullshit their way to glory. I’d bet that not a lot of important scientific advances started with “eureka!”; they started with “WTF is wrong with this POS, it’s acting really weird.”
The ICARUS paper doesn’t seem to help either; yes, the neutrino experimental results that are impossible under current theory are impossible under current theory. Thanks. As a recovering academic, I’m guessing it’s a good way for them to get publicity for some of their theoretical work by glomming on to the ACORN hoopla.
Jerzy Russian
@Warren Terra: As far as I know, the discrepancy has not been resolved. The time delay measured by Opera would seem to imply that the neutrinos from SN 1987A should have been seen several years earlier than they actually were. There is a recent diary at GOS about this:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/11/18/1037901/-The-Case-Against-Superluminal-Neutrinos-SN-1987A
Joel
Figure one is annotated in Comic Sans.
Totally worth a link through for that reason alone.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I’m skeptical that there is anything to this, but it would be great if something like this happened this early in the 21st century. I wonder how many will start crying that this is just government scientists trying to keep their jobs, not realizing that it started in Europe?
scav
@Jerzy Russian:
@RossinDetroit‘s second link to Matt Strassler also discusses it toward the bottom (although not as though it’s resolved, just how it might be used in the context of more data).
drew42
First, I agree with several others that this has been handled much better than the cold fusion fraud. I think everybody, including OPERA, have been appropriately skeptical.
Second, I totally want it to be true that they’ve measured neutrinos going faster than light. Because that would be awesome. I’m rooting for it — and I can, because I’m not a scientist.
bjacques
Eh, I’ll just wait for it all to shake out. Even if it does turn out the neutrinos travel faster than light, Teh Oil Companies will just suppress it and I won’t have to hear about it any more.
Like with the fabled 200-mpg carburetor(!), they’ll send a couple of hit men in double-breasted suits, white-guy afros and tinted aviator glasses, and that’ll be all she wrote.
RossinDetroit
@Jerzy Russian:
True. But the neutrinos in OPERA1 and the more accurate re-test OPERA2 were 10X more energetic than those from the supernova. Nobody has access to the raw data yet to check correlation between OPERA neutrino observed energies and their apparent speed. So it’s not apples/oranges but it’s Golden Delicious/Granny Smith.
Dustin
Wasn’t it more to do with the fact that neutrinos weren’t encumbered by trying to escape the interior of the supernova the same way EM energy was and that as a result they showed up three hours before the detonation was visible? I didn’t think that, outside of the bounds of this new data, the SN 1987A supernova results could determine neutrino velocity since their mass is still up for theoretical debate.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mike G:
Despite all efforts of the invisible-sky-buddy-bothered fucktards to stop it.
Picture the vile fascist shitstain William F. Buckley holding his hand up at the shore telling the tide not to come in.
Martin
@YoohooCthulhu:
Actually, it’s not. It’s a separate direct measure of a different part of theory. This is where science really meets the road.
You’ve got one attempt to take measurements to confirm/deny the speed of neutrinos, but at the same time you’ve got another measurement of energy conservation. You can’t have one set of measurements used to confirm one theory while another set of measurements off of the same experiment blows away part of general relativity. In fact, the latter, being the more heavily tested and supported theory should be used as a primary baseline for whether the former was done correctly, if you want to introduce any bias at all.
This is a bit like arguing over whether your measurement of Oprah’s blood alcohol level puts her above or below the legal limit, when you haven’t confirmed that the person you pulled over is even Oprah. You’ve got a whole bunch of baseline measurements that you need to take and compare to accepted theory, make sure those are all perfect, and then when they all line up, you can trust that the experiment is set up right and doing what you set out to do, and *then* you can see if your hypothesis is valid or not. This looks awfully like they didn’t get all of the confirming measurements completely checked.
Dustin
@drew42: Second, I totally want it to be true that they’ve measured neutrinos going faster than light. Because that would be awesome. I’m rooting for it—and I can, because I’m not a scientist.
As long as you admit bias, rely on observational data, and can accept the results if they turn out to not be superluminal you can still root for it, scientist or no. We’re all human and we all like exciting results. Any physicist that doesn’t get excited at the idea that standard theory may not be complete and that there’s “something new” has no business being a scientist in the first place.
Martin
@ericblair:
Wait, we’re blaming faster than light neutrinos on black people? Goddamn, I had no idea they were that much of a threat to America.
Tom Levenson
For background on the Cohen/Glashow argument that underlies the Icarus argument (not a refutation, as noted above), you can check out my rather long post of a little while ago.
And FWIW — part of the argument in that post was that this is how science should be done: release of data, open discussion, plenty of argument and analysis openly invited — together with detailed release of experimental methods and approaches, and, over time, replication (attempts) by other labs.
This is about as far from what happened in the cold fusion debacle as can be imagined.
Lihtox
The difference between a crackpot and a scientist is not the idea or the result– because scientists come up with some crazy things sometimes– but the willingness to accept that it might be wrong. Crackpots become defensive in the presence of skepticism; scientists expect and accept skepticism (with various degrees of graciousness, granted.)
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@ericblair:
The current theory has been very successful in explaining the universe so far. The measurements have to give an extraordinary reason for deciding the theory does not hold up. Until it does, the theory, and all of the predictions it makes, are what science has to go on. The theory of relativity, ICARUS is saying, states that there would be multiple effects of traveling faster than light, and that the energy measurments don’t match.
There will definitely need to be more data taken by different groups before we can start thinking about modifying currently accepted science.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@ericblair:
The current theory has been very successful in explaining the universe so far. The measurements have to give an extraordinary reason for deciding the theory does not hold up. Until it does, the theory, and all of the predictions it makes, are what science has to go on. The theory of relativity, ICARUS is saying, states that there would be multiple effects of traveling faster than light, and that the energy measurments don’t match.
There will definitely need to be more data taken by different groups before we can start thinking about modifying currently accepted science.
KG
@Mike G: Jesus didn’t ride a dinosaur… the bones were put there by God to test us. You failed the test by believing they were real.
/snark
(I have actually heard this as an explanation for fossils older than 6,000 years. I immediately left and went to drink, heavily)
The Other Bob
If I am flying in my spaceship at 99% the speed of light and I shoot nutrinos out the front, how much faster do they travel than my spaceship?
John Weiss
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Actually the result has been re-tested and was verified. We’ll see. Personally I’d hate to see Albert’s theory overturned. But it’s interesting. We can only learn something from this whether it’s overturning a very solid theory or the way we make measurements. Very interesting!
RossinDetroit
That could take a while. The second OPERA experiment involved creating packets of 300,000,000,000 neutrinos, bunching them up into 3 nanosecond bursts and sending them through 730 km of solid rock to a special detector. It takes several weeks at minimum to collect enough data to analyze. There aren’t a lot of facilities in the world with that capability. We could be waiting a while before appropriate independent attempts to verify are undertaken.
John Weiss
@Villago Delenda Est: Didn’t you see the Buckley interview off shore on his fancy-assed sailing boat with reporters, smoking a spliff? Call ’em what you want. He was not a fascist.
Peter
Basically what ICARUS is saying is that if the OPERA results are correct, shit is even crazier than we thought.
LanceThruster
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke, “Profiles of The Future”, 1961 (Clarke’s third law)
English physicist & science fiction author (1917 – )
RossinDetroit
@The Other Bob:
Depends on perspective. From your point of view they travel 100% of C faster than you. From a stationary frame of reference they go 1% faster.
I think.
ericblair
Bah, I didn’t catch that one. I guess they must be responsible for everything.
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Faster than light neutrinos are an extraordinary claim to start off with, and we have no clear hypothesis on what could be happening here. So it’s useful to document the repercussions to current theory if the claim holds, but it’s not a refutation. Apparently, they’re doing something impossible in the first place, so piling on theoretically doesn’t fix anything.
The OPERA team aren’t crackpots, and they’re asking for help, and this claim should be investigated for however long it takes to figure out what’s going on. Maybe the neutrinos are traveling faster than light, maybe there’s some other unknown effect that makes it appear this way, or likely it’s some experimental mistake that is hard to perceive. I hope it’s something new and unexpected, but I’m prepared for disappointment.
RossinDetroit
@ericblair:
If it does turn out to be experimental error then we learn something useful about the experiment. But that won’t make headlines.
Caz
Speaking of cold fusion, check out the recent news from Italy about strides being made. We are getting closer, but not there yet.
lol
We already have an explanation: it’s Jesus Christ and He died for your sins.
Canuckistani Tom
@John Weiss:
Overturned is not the right word. Isaac Newton’s work is fine on human scales. The house you live in, the building you work in, the car you drive, all would have been designed without taking relativistic effects into account. The reason being is that on a human scale, these effects are so minor that they can be ignored. My high school physics textbook had an example of solving a F=ma question with a 1kg ball accelerating at 1 g using Einsteinian physics compared to Newtonian. IIRC, the answers had no difference until you reached the tenth decimal place.
Newton’s work was not wrong. Neptune was discovered by observing Uranus, realizing something wasn’t right with the orbital motion of Uranus, and then ‘backtracking’ to find Neptune. It was only as time progressed and we made more and more precise measurements that we realized that Newton’s work broke down under extremes.
Cuppa Cabana
Jayzus H Christ what the fuck does this have to do with confirmation bias ? And comparison to cold fusion: huh?
Not a particle physicist? You don’t even have a feeble grasp on what “science” is.
David in NY
That’s a popular line of argument, but not (even among the evangelicals) a theologically respectable one. If God is perfect, the theological rebuttal goes, as s/he must be, then God will not go around playing tricks on, or even lying to, people. This “testing us” argument is false because it is beneath the God we believe in.
henqiguai
@The Other Bob (#49):
Depends entirely upon the energy you used to shoot the neutrinos out the from of your vessel. It all being relative, they would be moving ahead of you at the speed your energetic spurt initally imparted; minus any speed due to drag as they moved through the aether.
David in NY
Am I missing a joke?
henqiguai
@David in NY (#64):
Yes. See the Michelson-Morley experiment on the refutation of the concept of the luminiferous aether purported to permeate the universe. Hmmm; an early intuition of dark matter???
Maude
This is making my eyes roll back in my head it’s so boring. There’s jealousy and competition in the wonderful world of science. There will a lot more of this.
Judas Escargot
@Maude:
Now you know exactly how I feel about football threads. (Ducks, runs like hell).
Good thing it’s a free blog, and neither of us is forced to read (or comment on) threads we don’t like, eh? :P
LongHairedWeirdo
I don’t think this bears any resemblance to cold fusion. The scientists claiming to have made an observation are admitting they don’t know *why* they got the results they got.
They’re not saying “we proved neutrinos are FTL!” That’s a huge, clear difference.
I’ve become mildly excited over the result, not because I think we’ll find that we had neutrinos go FTL, but because I think we’ll learn something fascinating about what happened and why we got the measurements we did.
(ETA: “why we got the measurements we did” – I *am not* involved in the neutrino measurements. “We”, in this case, means “we human beings who are interested in science.” )
John Weiss
@henqiguai: “minus any speed due to drag as they moved through the aether.”
Aether?! That idea’s been dead for a century!
Knockabout
We seem to all be in agreement on one thing here: Zandar really shouldn’t be allowed to make any more science posts, as he’s clearly unqualified to do so.
scav
Nah, started a good discussion and bored certain commenters silly. Not bad all in all. Plus aether jokes.
gnomedad
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
The global warming hoax is an international conspiracy of capitalism-hating “scientists”, silly.