Before You Start Building That Starship (in your backyard)
A friend of mine excitedly sent me a text message about results published from CERN where they had measured the speed of neutrinos moving in excess of the speed of light.
I treat what I hear in the media with a well tailored dose of skepticism. It is rare for a research institution to make such a announcement and there certainly had to be more to it than what was being said.
Visiting the CERN website I first had to find the Opera Experiment which reported the result. After a little digging I hit pay dirt!
Located in Italy, Opera (which stands for Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) is a 1300 ton detector made of blocks of photographic plates. Each of the blocks (called a 'brick') is interleaved with lead sheeting and surrounded with electronic detectors.
450 miles away in Switzerland, CERN would fire up their accelerator and send bursts of muon neutrinos in the direction of the Opera detector through the mantle of the earth. After passing through the mantle they collide with the detector leaving traces on consecutive photo plates. The energy of the particles can be calculated from the number of successive lead plates penetrated.
Opera has been operating since 2008 with the plates periodically removed from the detector and the data processed. The plates are then reconditioned and returned to the detector.
What has the 170 physicists of the Opera project a bit confused is that their measured speed of some of these muon neutrinos is about 60 nanoseconds faster then they should be traveling. (that's 60 billions of a second)
We've seen results like this before at FermiLab but they were not considered significant because the measured error was greater than the measured difference in speed.
The travel time from Cern to Opera should be about 3 milliseconds. The reported measured error is only 10 nanoseconds which if this result can be reproduced may be significant. CERN wants FermiLab in Chicago and TK2 in Japan to attempt to reproduce the results.
Don't expect this to result in an up-ending of Relativity (or enable you to build that Star Ship) even if the results can be confirmed. Richard Feynman once described particle physics as taking two pocket watches, smashing them together at incredible speed and by watching the angle, speed and direction of the contents fly out, deduce the structural mechanics of the pocket watch.
I however prefer an old medical school adage ...
"when you hear horse hoves, don't think zebras"
Read more about it!
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2010/PR08.10E.html
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Where's the Ka-Boom? There was supposed to be a Ka-Boom!
When I was a student up at Western, some whacka-doodle (I mean visiting professor) over in the physics department decided to steal some gear from one of the labs and concoct a quickie little neutrino detector.
He salvaged three 200 gallon oil storage tanks, pulled money out of petty cash, got a box of photomultiplier tubes (government surplus), 'borrowed' a PDP-11 from one of the labs and descended down in the basement (cut to Walter Bishop's lab in Fringe) of the unused (and unlocked) old women's dormitory on the east side of campus, setting to work with a couple of graduate students and the schools administration carefully looking the other way!
Weeks later when he was done, his baby neutrino detector couldn't do much more than record events, but there was an electricity in the air as I sat at its console marveling at what you can do on a shoe-string budget.
The best part was that the detector and all its electronics were fully portable. In a rare bit of bravado, the prof loaded up the detector and his students into a Ryder truck and took a little road-trip over to this little known place outside of Chicago called Fermi Lab.
When he got there he managed a quick meeting with the director (I think they knew each other from a previous Federal gig) to request that he be permitted to locate his "detector that could" over in the target building to do some calibration studies.
Well apparently this little sit-down didn't go so very well so somewhere between the "no" and the "hell no" the visiting professor was working out Plan B.
Gathering the N-Squad in a local restaurant with a topo map of the area, a compass and a ruler he plotted his next daring move.
About fourteen miles beyond the target building he found what he was looking for, an IHOP that fell within the projected path of the beam, complete with a big parking lot and a sympathetic manager.
Carefully parking the Ryder truck to line up with his projection of the beam path he switched on his instrument and a cheer went out as the ASR 33 teletype started chattering with detected events.
While the Director of Fermi Lab didn't want to be seen as associating with the odd little pocket size project, he had apparently failed to consider that the beam path never got the memo and as the accelerator fired on a reliably timed interval of 1.1 to 1.2 seconds, the little detector that could was reliably picking off these events like a Timex watch.
The prof immediately realized the only thing missing was an audience, so he called the press.
The local CBS affiliate showed up with camera's and with the teletype behind them chattering off acknowledgement of each detected event, a reporter and the professor stood in the truck explaining on camera how beams of invisible particles were blasting through some unsuspecting truckers breakfast stack of pancakes and into his mobile detector.
Indeed a rare moment ...
When CERN made its 'curious' announcement (and the press went almost as wild as they do when Sarah Palin changes her lipstick), to me it was like jumping in the WayBack machine with Mr. Peabody.
The CBS affiliate didn't get the chance to play with the story of the IHOP neutrino detector as much as they have with the CERN/OPERA observations but that may be just the character of the animal these days.
Back then it was "Fermi Lab", "target building", "beam", "detector". Please ignore the IHOP in the back ground.
Pretty boring on the face of it but like the time one of my experiments erupted under the hood and I suddenly discovered my adviser who moments before had been standing next to me had within microseconds teleported himself to the apparent safety of the lab door; science, even the boring stuff is always good, so long as you can avoid the Ka-Boom.
Ethan 'Wildman' Siegel down in Portlandia has put together an interesting take on the CERN/OPERA observations http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/10/game_over_for_faster-tha...
But despite the non controversial controversy of it all at the end of the day it still doesn't change my addictive need for two cups of java in the morning (before I put my face on) and the delightful five year old wonder I get when reading the early test results coming out of ALMA, http://www.almaobservatory.org/en/science-with-alma
No Spaceship....
I've always favored teleportation as opposed to spaceships. Spaceships are messy. They involve people cooped up in close quarters for intolerable lengths of time (anything longer than an hour) and unsanitary conditions with very bad food. Give me an everyday teleportation booth any day. Just walk in and Zingo! you are there. My garage is filled with the parts for just such a machine, powered with wayward neutrinos, of course, and completely off the grid. Now if I could only find the correct way to assemble all those parts my fortune would be made. I think tab "A" goes into slot "B" and is fastened with bolt "C". Or is it bolt "D"? Pay attention now, this could be important!
Vince, KB6GV
50 foot nutrinos
I think it very likely that the nutrino footprint, or measurement error, can account for the 50 feet... just my nickle.
And my warp drive is coming along fine in the back yard :>
David W. GlassmanKF7LQQ