Comments about "Faster-than-light neutrino anomaly" in Wikipedia
This document contains comments about the article Faster-than-light neutrino anomaly in Wikipedia
- The text in italics is copied from that url
- Immediate followed by some comments
In the last paragraph I explain my own opinion.
Contents
Reflection
Introduction
The article starts with the following sentence.
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In 2011, the OPERA experiment mistakenly observed neutrinos appearing to travel faster than light.
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Okay.
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Even before the mistake was discovered, the result was considered anomalous because speeds higher than that of light in a vacuum are generally thought to violate special relativity, a cornerstone of the modern understanding of physics for over a century
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The emphasis on SR is dubious. From a physical point of view the experiment has nothing to do with SR.
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Neutrinos have small but nonzero mass, and so special relativity predicts that they must propagate at speeds slower than light.
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Based on which grounds makes SR that prediction?
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1 Detection
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1.1 First results
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1.2 Internal replication
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1.3 Measurement errors
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1.4 End results
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2 Independent replication
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3 The measurement
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3.1 Overview
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3.2 Measuring distance
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3.3 Measuring trip time
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4 The analysis
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5 Reception by the physics community
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6 Discussions within the OPERA collaboration
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7. See also
Following is a list with "Comments in Wikipedia" about related subjects
Reflection 1 - General
The best document to study the neutrino velocity is the document: "Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam" https://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897
The first line of the Abstract reads:
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The OPERA neutrino experiment at the underground Gran Sasso Laboratory has measured the velocity of neutrinos from the CERN CNGS beam over a baseline of about 730 km.
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What the experiment does is to measure the time of flight of a short bunch of neutrino's.
What this experiment did not test is the speed of the neutrino versus the speed of light. There is nothing wrong with this and an extreme interesting result.
However that is not what I would think the experiment should have done. Instead the experiment should have been capable to perform the transmission at CERN of two bunches: one with photons and one with neutrino's. At Grand Sasso both these bunches should have been detected with the emphasis on which comes first. That is all.
The reason is, because it is not really necessary to detect the speed of the neutrino's. Speeds require clocks and that makes the experiment overly complex.
Reflection 2
Reflection 3
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Created: 26 March 2020
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