Recall a few years back, a physics lab in Italy reported faster than light neutrino observations. After some ado, they finally diagnosed a dodgy optical interconnect.
How does that result occur? An intermittent interface would produce a broken signal, or reduced RMS power, or perhaps data bit errors, if used for communication.
But how does a faulty connection result in a spuriously high velocity measurement?
As I recall, a transmission line delay was misidentified (or poorly calibrated). There's lots of patch cables in 'a physics lab'.
"A link from a GPS receiver to the OPERA master clock was loose, which increased the delay through the fiber. The glitch's effect was to decrease the reported flight time of the neutrinos by 73 ns, making them seem faster than light."
So the GPS synchronised clock wasn't correctly synchronised, and the experimenters though that the neutrinos they detected were arriving earlier than they actually were.
I would have been really cool if they had found the particles arrived before they departed. "There once was a lady named Blight"...
On a sunny day (Tue, 7 Jul 2020 19:37:12 -0700 (PDT)) it happened RichD wrote in :
I remember that in the news, silly. Could be as simple as using the wrong length of coax and not taking into account its delay.
PS as to accelerators and similar things to find out about nature of particles: Let's assume particle X is a bit more complex than just a stone After all we know s*it about even electrons.
Now if somebody tried to sell me the idea that by shooting iphones into androids at Mach 6 they would find out all about those chips and the software...
There goes your tax money.
But Jan Panteltje isn't.
There's not a lot to know. There's a whole more complexity in the tiniest rock (which is built up of atoms) than there is in the electron.
Iphones and Anroids are even more complicated than rocks.
Shooting high-energy X-rays into them would be more informative, but it would stop them working.
There are plenty of other even sillier ways of using it up.
No, they didn't.
The lab reported that they were having trouble with their measurements - taken at face value, they would indicate neutrinos going faster than light. Since they wanted to rule out every other more conventional explanation first, and as they couldn't find the error themselves, they were asking other scientists for help.
Then some tabloid media heard about it and thought it would be fun to mock people doing their job and being honest about their problems.
Well, CERN did not see it that way. The PI (Principal Investigator, meaning the project manager) lost his job in consequence.
Joe Gwinn
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