Neutrinos Travel No Faster Than Light, Says ICARUS 112
ananyo writes "Neutrinos obey nature's speed limit, according to new results from an Italian experiment. The finding, posted to the preprint server arXiv.org, contradicts a rival claim from the OPERA experiment that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light. ICARUS, located just a few meters from OPERA, clocked neutrinos traveling at the speed of light, and no faster, after monitoring a beam of neutrinos sent from CERN in late October and early November of last year. The neutrinos were packed into pulses just four nanoseconds long. That meant the timing could be measured far more accurately than the original OPERA measurement, which used ten microsecond pulses. The new findings are yet another blow to OPERA's results. Researchers there had announced possible timing problems with their original measurements. For many, this will pretty much be case closed."
Re:Didn't they already find an equipment error? (Score:5, Interesting)
I always assumes the faster than light shit wasn't an actual claim, just lazy reporters trying to hype up some attention and web clicks or what not.
Of course that was the claim, but in a sane science to layman translation it'd be: "We have this crazy result here with neutrinos that seem to go 60ns faster than light speed. Pretty much all of established science goes against this, but we've double checked our equipment and figures and can't find the error. So we're telling you about it so someone else can run this experiment and see if they get crazy results too, meanwhile we'll triple check our equipment and figures." There's not a single scientist surprised by this eventually being proven to be just a fluke. Nor by journalists hearing "blah blah blah neutrinos blah faster than light blah blah blah", lets make a headline. Absolutely par for the course, as far as science reporting is concerned.