Not faster than light after all

Oddly enough, my post a while back on the Higgs Boson was oddly popular.  It seemed to me that more of that traffic should have gone to bloggers who are actually, you know, scientists.  Anyway, I meant to also post about faster-than-light neutrinos (and even thought I had), but apparently I never did.  Anyway, presumably most of you are familiar with the story.  There’s now a second round of stroies (the first round was a month or two ago) about how some errors mean, no, some neutrinos do not move faster than light after all.  I do find it amusing– though not at all surprising– that the stories suggesting that there’s not faster than light neutrinos have way less coverage than the original stories suggesting this possibility.  Anyway, the deal:

It appears that the faster-than-light neutrino results, announced last September by the OPERA collaboration in Italy, was due to a mistake after all. A bad connection between a GPS unit and a computer may be to blame.

Physicists had detected neutrinos travelling from the CERN laboratory in Geneva to the Gran Sasso laboratory near L’Aquila that appeared to make the trip in about 60 nanoseconds less than light speed. Many other physicists suspected that the result was due to some kind of error, given that it seems at odds with Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. That theory has been vindicated by many experiments over the decades.

According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos’ flight and an electronic card in a computer. After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fiber, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed. Since this time is subtracted from the overall time of flight, it appears to explain the early arrival of the neutrinos. New data, however, will be needed to confirm this hypothesis.

Something like this honestly seemed likely in the end, as faster than light neutrinos would have basically overturned everything we think we know about the universe.  But how cool would that have been?  We’re talking Einstein and Relativity big.  Anyway, on the topic of cool physics stuff, I absolutely loved this Dilbert from earlier this week:

For those not in the know, some like to call the Higgs Boson the “God Particle.”