When physicists announced last September that they had potentially detected neutrinos travelling at faster than the speed of light, it created a massive news story and lots of comment on what this result could mean for science.
If true, it would have broken one of the basic laws of physics – that nothing can travel faster than light and would have proven Albert Einstein wrong. Some commentators even suggested that it could have paved the way for time travel.
Now it seems that after repeating the experiments and looking more closely at the experimental setup, the result could just be an error caused by a faulty connection between a GPS unit and a computer.
Many physicists had already been sceptical of the results. Professor of Theoretical Physics at Surrey University Jim Al-Khalili famously vowed to “eat his shorts” on live TV if the results were accurate.
Late yesterday the scientists at OPERA, the group of scientists working on the project released a statement to address rumours which had been circulating about the results.
“The OPERA Collaboration, by continuing its campaign of verifications on the neutrino velocity measurement, has identified two issues that could significantly affect the reported result”, the statement read.
“The first one is linked to the oscillator used to produce the events time-stamps in between the GPS synchronizations. The second point is related to the connection of the optical fiber bringing the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock.”
“These two issues can modify the neutrino time of flight in opposite directions. While continuing our investigations, in order to unambiguously quantify the effect on the observed result, the Collaboration is looking forward to performing a new measurement of the neutrino velocity as soon as a new bunched beam will be available in 2012. An extensive report on the above mentioned verifications and results will be shortly made available to the scientific committees and agencies.”
In many ways, this is a little disappointing. Scientists always want to figure out something new – even if it conflicts with what they thought they knew. Nevertheless, the story is a nice example of how the scientific process should work: interesting results are obtained by one group and they open it up for examination or peer-review by other groups to make sure the results are valid.
It can be frustrating at times and lead to a little embarrassment when you realise you’ve made a mistake, but the process generally works and it’s how science progresses. Slowly at times, but progressing nonetheless.