And there have been several.Ī neutrino is detected in Italy, 500 miles from CERN, and the time is recorded. This is what inspired the team to go public in the first place: to advertise their concerns in the hope that other experts might come up with ideas. The team is primarily a group of high-energy physicists, and computer experts however, the experiment requires expertise in many other areas. This aspect of my personal mystery typifies the problems that the actual experimenters have. Comments are subject to the laws of libel no less than printed media the offending item was removed by the moderator. One commenter, under the cloak of anonymity, took this to mean that I had not read the paper, and insisted on repeating this. I admitted in the article that this was a “mystery to me”. I read the paper on how they determine the distance, and the methods involved details of geodesy, which are outside my expertise. I already mentioned some of the problems with the experiment – how it measures the time and the distance involved at huge accuracy, and then takes the ratio to get a speed. I agree finding out what is the challenge. So the fact that the experiment “only” found them travelling at 1.00005 times light speed suggested that there was some underestimated error somewhere, and that the true answer would turn out to be 1.

One person also pointed out that if neutrinos could really go faster than light, then they could have gone at any speed, up to infinite. Firstly, it was questioned that if neutrinos could indeed travel faster than light, the neutrinos from the supernova in 1987 (which had travelled 187,000 light years across space) should have arrived 4 days before the supernova was seen by eye, contrary to what was observed. There were a couple of cogent remarks on The Observer’s comments section. The response to my article created some waves.

If anything, concerns about the result have increased.

I have already advertised my caution in The Observer, and a month later nothing has changed. To readers of Neutrino, rest assured: there is no need yet for a rewrite based on news that neutrinos might travel faster than light.

Neutrinos faster than light