More news on Neutrinos, one of the hottest topics in science:
http://news.discovery.com/space/reality ... gn=rssnws1Honestly, so much has been written about these results in the last few days, it's hard to know where to begin, but here's the gist: In experiments conducted between CERN (European Centre for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland and a laboratory in Italy, neutrinos were clocked zipping along at 300,006 kilometers (186,000 miles) per second -- i.e., slightly faster than the speed of light.
Scientists blasted a laser-like beam producing billions upon billions of neutrinos from CERN to the Gran Sasso Laboratory 730 kilometers (453 miles) away. It takes fractions of a second for neutrinos to travel that distance, and when they get to OPERA, they strike the detector, which is composed of 150,000 bricks of alternating lead plates and photographic emulsion films. To figure out just how fast they're going, you divide the distance between the two points by the measured time it took for the neutrinos to travel between them.
The result: The neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds earlier than the 2.3 milliseconds taken by light. "This result comes as a complete surprise," said physicist Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the OPERA experiment. "We wanted to measure the speed of neutrinos, but we didn't expect to find anything special." Hah! You're studying neutrinos, dude. Expect the unexpected.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/ ... neutrinos/As a spokesperson for the MINOS neutrino experiment told Ars yesterday, there are three potential sources of error in the timing measurements: distance errors, time-of-flight errors, and errors in the timing of neutrino production. The vast majority of both the paper and the lecture were dedicated to discussing how these errors were reduced (the actual detection of the neutrinos was only a small portion of the paper).
