Particles Appear to Travel Faster Than Light: OPERA Experiment Reports Anomaly in Flight Time of Neutrinos from Science Daily.
From the post:
Scientists with the OPERA experiment, which observes a neutrino beam from CERN 730 km away at Italy’s INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory, are presenting surprising new results (in a seminar at CERN on Sept. 23, 2011) that appear to show neutrinos traveling faster than light.
The OPERA result is based on the observation of over 15000 neutrino events measured at Gran Sasso, and appears to indicate that the neutrinos travel at a velocity 20 parts per million above the speed of light, nature’s cosmic speed limit. Given the potential far-reaching consequences of such a result, independent measurements are needed before the effect can either be refuted or firmly established. This is why the OPERA collaboration has decided to open the result to broader scrutiny. The collaboration’s result is available on the preprint server arXiv (http://arxiv.org/list/hep-ex/new).
It will take weeks, months or perhaps years to confirm or refute these findings. And that lies firmly in the province of high-energy physics. So why mention it here?
Whatever the outcome, I take this as a reminder that we create models of reality. Relativity, both special and general are such models. Useful models but then so were Newtonian physics (which remain useful by the way).
Our ontologies, data structures, identification systems, etc., are all models. The only thing that separates them, one from another, is whether they are useful for some specified purpose or not.
[…] Sounds interesting but remember that Einstein may have been wrong about other issues: Models, Relativity & Reality. […]
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