News Speed of light broken?

[T.Neo]

Seems a bit harsh. I mean, he never struck me as sensationalist and went through the proper channels, I don't see much he could have done differently with the numbers turning up the way they did...

Perhaps he simply fell victim to crushing disappointment... :shifty:

 

[Face]

Perhaps he simply fell victim to crushing disappointment... :shifty:

After reading the following part of the article, I doubt that.

Reports said some members of his group, called Opera, had wanted him to resign.

Sounds more like bullying to me.

 

[Arrowstar]

Shame. It sounds like he did everything correctly. This is how good science is supposed to work: run an experiment, internally verify your results, and then open them to the community.

 

[Keatah]

One little mistake was made, it was an intermittent connector, either loose or had corrosion on it. That is what caused the bogus results. This could happen to anyone!

 

[RisingFury]

One little mistake was made, it was an intermittent connector, either loose or had corrosion on it. That is what caused the bogus results. This could happen to anyone!

My guess is part of the team did not want the results released because they just couldn't believe them to be accurate. I too think it's harsh to ask him to resign.

It's kind of an embarrassing mistake, but it happens to everyone.

 

[Izack]

My guess is part of the team did not want the results released because they just couldn't believe them to be accurate. I too think it's harsh to ask him to resign.

Aye. IIRC some members of that team refused to sign the initial paper.

And now what we have here is a classic scapegoat. I feel bad for him.

 

[orb]

SPACE.com: Final Nail? Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos Aren't, Scientists Conclude:

The final nail in the coffin may have been dealt to the idea that neutrino particles can travel faster than light.

The same lab that first reported the shocking results last September, which could have upended much of modern physics, has now reported that the subatomic particles called neutrinos "respect the cosmic speed limit," or the speed of light.

Physicist Sergio Bertolucci, research director at Switzerland's CERN physics lab, presented the results today (June 8) at the 25th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto, Japan.

"Although this result isn't as exciting as some would have liked, it is what we all expected deep down," Bertolucci said in a statement.

The new findings come from four experiments that study streams of neutrinos sent from CERN in Geneva to the INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. All four, including the experiment behind the first faster-than-light findings, called OPERA, found that this time around, the nearly massless neutrinos traveled quickly, but not that quickly.

{...}

 

[FADEC]

Wouldn't we know it

 

[palebluevoice]

No surprise here; bad thing is, this won't be reported as widely as the initial story, so a good percentage of the population(and science fiction writers) will still think neutrinos are faster than light.

 

[MattBaker]

Well, "Neutrinos are faster than the speed of light!" or "Einstein was wrong!" is a better headline than "CERN makes measurement error".