Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos? Physics Luminaries Voice Doubts

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We asked a number of physicists for their reaction to the announcement of neutrinos breaking the cosmic speed limit

By John Matson ?| September 26, 2011?|

FULL HOUSE: Dario Autiero of the OPERA collaboration announced his team's surprising finding on the speed of neutrinos to a packed auditorium at CERN on September 23. Image: ? CERN

A few dozen nanoseconds, an imperceptibly slim interval in everyday life, can make all the difference in experimental physics. A European physics collaboration made a stunning announcement September 23, after having clocked elementary particles called neutrinos making the underground journey from a lab in Switzerland to one in Italy. The neutrinos made the trip 60 nanoseconds faster than they would have traveling at light speed, the researchers found. Faster, that is, than the rules of physics as we understand them would allow.

If confirmed, the results from the OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) collaboration would be huge, a once-in-a-lifetime revolution in how we understand the universe. But there are plenty of reasons to believe that Albert Einstein's long-reigning theory of relativity will survive this challenge, as it has withstood so many in the past. [Read more about challenges to relativity in this article.]

That is the opinion of a number of physicists we contacted, many of them on Scientific American's board of advisers. Their reactions to the OPERA announcement appear below.

Astrophysicist and cosmologist Martin Rees of the University of Cambridge:
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I think it will be perceived in retrospect as an embarrassment that this claim received so much publicity?the inevitable consequence of posting a preprint on the web. Neutrinos were observed from SN1987A more or less coincidentally with the explosion?not four years earlier, as would have been the case if the velocity difference had been the same as is now claimed (though of course the energies of the supernova neutrinos are much lower).

Theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin, winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics:
I haven't seen any scientific article describing this work. It bothers me that there is plenty of evidence that all sorts of other particles never travel faster than light, while observations of neutrinos are exceptionally difficult. It is as if someone said that there are fairies in the bottom of their garden, but they can only be seen on dark foggy nights.

Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University:
It is an embarrassment as far as I am concerned. It was not unreasonable for the experimentalists to submit a paper with an unexplained result. But a press conference on a result which is extremely unlikely to be correct, before the paper has been refereed, is very unfortunate, for CERN and for science. Once it is shown to be wrong, everyone loses credibility. Neutrino experiments are hard, and systematic errors at the limit of resolution can be significant. Moreover, because the experiment appears to violate Lorentz invariance, which is at the heart of so much known physics, one should be skeptical. One should be additionally skeptical because observations of SN1987A showed, as I wrote in 1998, that neutrinos and photons travel at the same speed to one part in a billion, several orders of magnitude below the claimed effect. Now, the only way out of that is to have some energy-dependent effect, but all the ones that make sense don't wash here.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=ef46af9731a1e1c4a216bc03b41aa64e

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