Blog – Of Particular Significance

Family holiday here in the United States today.  That doesn’t mean no work for faculty.  Indeed this is the busiest time of year for most scientists in my field, when many chores that you don’t want to know about all come due at once, but I have managed to squeeze in a little time to try to put my posts on OPERA (the speedy-neutrino experiment) into a permanent form on the website.  I should have done this to start with, but honestly I wasn’t sure initially that OPERA’s result would survive a week of scrutiny!  Since it is now clear OPERA will be around for a while longer, I wanted to make it easier for readers to find things.

If you put your mouse over ARTICLES at the top of the page, you’ll see a whole new subsection on “Neutrinos Faster Than Light”, and underneath that other pages and subsections with more pages.  All of these are copies of posts that were posted earlier, so there’s no new information if you’ve read all those posts, but if you are new here or haven’t already looked at everything I’d written before on the subject, I hope that it will now be marginally easier to navigate.  Please let me know if you find any problems (such as broken links).  There’s also some basic information on neutrinos under “ARTICLES/Particle Physics Basics/Neutrinos”.

[If you want to know more about the OPERA experiment’s most recent result on neutrino speeds, and how it is much better than their previous one but still does not settle all the issues, click here.]

The ICARUS experiment, like the Cohen-Glashow paper on which they rely, are claiming again to “refute” the OPERA experiment on superluminal neutrinos.  (I already wrote about that here.)  I’m sympathetic, personally, but although it does provide a very strong constraint on any modification of relativity that could permit what OPERA observes, logically this does not, in my current view, constitute a refutation.   (more…)

Ok, I’ve finished an article (probably still requiring minor revisions for clarity and correctness) explaining why the recent update on the OPERA experiment is important, as well as making clear what it does and doesn’t mean.  I hope the writing is sufficiently understandable… but as I tried to write it fairly quickly, there may be some places where I have lapsed into jargon or left something out, so feel free to ask questions about points you can’t follow.

If you haven’t read about OPERA at all before, you might find this new article a little hard to follow in places.  If so, you may find useful what I’ve previously written about OPERA. Friday’s post provided a guide to my earlier OPERA posts, as well as a link to a Q&A session that many of you may find useful.  Over the next week I’ll be copying these posts over into articles that will be better organized and easier to find… so expect some Under Construction signs around for the next few days.