麻豆淫院

October 6, 2011

New theories emerge to disprove OPERA faster-than-light neutrinos claim

Schematic view of the Opera Detector
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Schematic view of the Opera Detector

(麻豆淫院Org.com) -- It's been just two weeks since the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA) team released its claiming that they muon neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light, causing an uproar in the physics community. Since that time, many papers (perhaps as many as 30 to the preprint server arXiv alone) have been published seeking ways to discredit the findings. Thus far though, only two seem credible.

is by Andrew Cohen and Sheldon Glashow, who together point out that if the in the study were in fact traveling as fast as claimed, they should have been radiating particles as they went, leaving behind a measurable trail; this due to the energy transfer that would occur between particles moving at different speeds. And since the OPERA team didn鈥檛 observe any such trail (or at least didn鈥檛 report it) it follows that the neutrinos weren鈥檛 in fact traveling as fast as were claimed and the resultant speed measurements would have to be attributed to something else.

Neither of these papers actually disproves the results found by the OPERA team of course, the first merely suggests there may be a problem with the way the measurements were taken, the second takes more of a 鈥渋t can鈥檛 be true because of鈥︹ approach which only highlight the general disbelief in the physics community regarding the very possibility of anything, much less the speed of neutrinos traveling faster than the , messing with Einstein鈥檚 most basic theories. The first can be addressed rather easily by the OPERA team if it so desires, and the second, well, if the neutrinos did in fact travel faster than the speed of light and did so without leaving a trail, a lot of physics theory will have to be rethought. Though that may not necessarily be a bad thing, physics is supposed to be about finding answers to explain the natural world around us after all, even if it means going back to the drawing board now and then.

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