Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos Might Be Explained By GPS Failing to Account For Special Relativity
Rebecca Boyle
at 07:09 AM 18 Oct 2020
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My experiment worked! All my clocks are precisely 25 minutes slow!
IMAGE BY Universal Pictures
Science // 

So it turns out that Einstein may not have been wrong about the universal speed limit. Not only is special relativity safe, it provides an explanation for those faster-than-light neutrinos. They're not breaking the light-speed barrier; they just appear to be, thanks to the relativistic motion of the clocks checking their speed.

As we all remember, a few weeks ago some scientists at CERN set the physics world on fire when they shared data showing neutrinos were moving faster than light. Specifically, they were showing up at a distant neutrino detector about 60 nanoseconds faster than the time in which light would make the same trip. But the rules of physics said this could not be. The Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA)  team - which was not looking for this result, by the way -calibrated their clocks, measured their distances and crunched their numbers in search of an explanation.

Flummoxed, they dumped their findings on the larger physics community, which proceeded to eviscerate the experiment. In the three weeks since, almost 100 papers have shown up on the preprint server arXiv trying to make sense of it all. Physicists have blamed everything from poor geodesy to ill-timed clocks, and other particle physics observatories are hard at work trying to replicate the results.

Now a Dutch physicist says it's really very simple - the OPERA team overlooked the relativistic motion of their clocks. Technology Review's arXiv blog highlights the paper here.

 
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