“There’s no credible experiment at this moment that would indicate a neutrino’s heresy against Einstein’s commandments.”
Lubos Motl reports:
The OPERA detector originally detected neutrinos that were arriving to the Gran Sasso cavern (or tavern) in central Italy 60±10 nanoseconds too early after their 730-kilometer (2.4 nanoseconds) trip from CERN. If that were so, they would have been 0.0025% (25 ppm) faster than light in the vacuum.
Many of us remained sane and realized that this can’t happen; it follows that the OPERA was out-of-tune. And indeed, the mistake was found in the timing: loose cables and wrong interpolation in the GPS synchronization procedures have to be blamed for up to 100 ns and dozens of ns in the opposite direction. (And maybe other things they haven’t found or announced yet were wrong, too.)
Even though some physicists incredibly enough remain ambivalent, it’s clear that most of the discrepancy – to say the least – has gone away (and will officially go away once the new paper is published) and there’s no credible experiment at this moment that would indicate a neutrino’s heresy against Einstein’s commandments. The only question is how accurately OPERA will manage to measure the speed of light in their corrected paper but I am not too interested in that given the fact that they’re able to produce a 60-nanosecond error, anyway…
This was not published work, they went public with their inconsistency and asked others to help look and find problems that could explain it. That is a acceptible, no? But relying on theoretical physics to say that this is impossible, is only as good as the original theory. I don’t think for a second that we fully understand things enough to say, 100% this is unchangeable law. We will change and revise our understanding as time goes one, but I don’t doubt some new findings, that will turn out real, will meet just as much indignant response and arrogance about how they cant be true.
Murphy’s Law – Corrolary: Nature sides with the hidden flaw.
Whenever your measurements sugegst a violation of known natural law, look first for a systematic error in the measurements. Do NOT ruch to publication with carelessly checked results.
So when you update your data, and test your theory based on falsifiable claims, that’s SCIENCE!