Science!

[Colonel Flagg]

Originally Posted by elx

after reading a ton of stupid articles claiming that we have just sent a particle back in time through another dimension, I finally read opera's release and I don't get it

if they have the level of accuracy/uncertainty that they are claiming - isn't that higher than the one we achieved when measuring the speed of light half a century ago? assuming that this is actually the case, then wouldn't that imply that the implication here isn't that a neutrino is actually faster than the speed of light, but simply that our accepted model for the speed of light has been off this entire time? why has no one proposed this skepticism? why are they more quick to accept the back-in-time theory?

is it just that if that is in fact the case then it's far too scary to mention or think about because it means that everything we have ever measured in modern history has been wrong and we've set ourselves back two hundred years with our newer, preciser technology? is preciser a word?

Originally Posted by Colonel Flagg

I generally don't pay attention to old levels of accuracy unless it's for historical purposes. Lightspeed is known to 4ppb, and this specifie measurement of neutrino speed is greater than that by 20 ppm, with an accuracy of 270 ppb. That's a big enough difference (a factor of 75 over the error) for most physicists to stand up and take notice.

Believe it or not, this is the more plausible reasoning, for now. Unless someone wants to write an entirely new model of physics, then this is the path most mainstream physicists will take.

Of course, you are right; for example, the neutrino could have negative mass ...

Putting this where it belongs.

elx, you really need to post in the science forum. The nerds post here.