Cheshire Cat Photo Blog(...said the Cat: 'we're all mad here....')

“Faster than a speeding bullet…”

Last year, the scientists at CERN in Switzerland reported the extraordinary experimental results of the Opera experiments: neutrinos that appeared to travel FASTER than the speed of light in a vacuum! But Einstein told us that NOTHING travels faster than the speed of light…. I’m so CONFUSED! 😉

Now, follow-up experiments called “Icarus,” in which neutrinos were ALSO fired from the CERN particle accelerator outside of Geneva, Switzerland, and traveled to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, about 730 km (454 miles) away, shows the neutrinos were traveling UNDER light speed! In February, there was news (reported in Science) that a fiber optic connection problem could have resulted in too short a “flight time” for neutrinos. The fiber fed GPS location data into the master clock for the Opera experiment. However, ANOTHER “possible effect concerns an oscillator used to provide the time stamps for GPS synchronizations. It could have led to an overestimate of the neutrino’s time of flight,” CERN said with regard to the earlier, Opera experiments, which would make neutrinos even FASTER!

See all the troubles you can have when you are measuring little tiny almost mass-less particles that are traveling very, very fast?

“The evidence is beginning to point towards the OPERA result being an artifact of the measurement,” said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci in a statement today. However, to be rigorous about the matter, the laboratories plan to rerun the experiment in May and cross-check it with data involving cosmic ray particles.

“Whatever the result, the OPERA experiment has behaved with perfect scientific integrity in opening their measurement to broad scrutiny, and inviting independent measurements,” Bertolucci said. “This is how science works.”

The fact that science does not care what your opinion is was one of the things that attracted me to a scientific path in childhood. Seeing how the world of humans operates often makes me wish that some of our other activities were run rigorously and openly, with “broad scrutiny” and “perfect scientific integrity.”

-Bill at

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