One of the most staggering results in physics – that neutrinos may go faster than light – has not gone away with two further weeks of observations. The researchers behind the jaw-dropping finding are now confident enough in the result that they are submitting it to a peer-reviewed journal.
"The measurement seems robust," says Luca Stanco of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Padua, Italy. "We have received many criticisms, and most of them have been washed out."
Faster-than-light neutrino update: What's going on behind the scenes? - Maggie Koerth-Baker
The publication process for a research paper about physics works a little differently than other subjects. That's because of arXiv. Funded by Cornell University, this site posts research papers, before they're formally published in a scientific journal. Unlike most scientific journals, which charge big fees for subscriptions or even to view a single paper, arXiv is free and open to the public. You can read everything published there—more than 700,000 papers about physics, math, computer science, and more. The other big difference: arXiv isn't peer reviewed. At least, not ahead of time.
A lot of the time, when you read a newspaper article about a new study in one of those fields, the study hasn't actually yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. It's just been posted to arXiv, which sort of becomes a crowd-sourced peer review peer review of its own. Especially for headline-grabbing research making big, bold claims.
That's the background you need to understand what's going on right now with the study that claimed to find neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. That announcement was made in an arXiv paper. Putting those results on arXiv was as much a way of saying, "Woah, we just found something crazy, please tell us if you see something we've done wrong," as it was a formal declaration of scientific discovery.
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That's why it's not terribly weird that you're now hearing all sorts of criticism of the original FTL neutrino findings. That's what was supposed to happen. It's also not terribly weird that the original researchers have announced that they're going to re-do the experiment themselves, taking into account some of the big criticisms brought up on arXiv.
Particles break light-speed limit - Geoff Brumfiel
An Italian experiment has unveiled evidence that fundamental particles known as neutrinos can travel faster than light. Other researchers are cautious about the result, but if it stands further scrutiny, the finding would overturn the most fundamental rule of modern physics — that nothing travels faster than 299,792,458 metres per second.
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The idea that nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum is the cornerstone of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, which itself forms the foundation of modern physics. If neutrinos are travelling faster than light speed, then one of the most fundamental assumptions of science — that the rules of physics are the same for all observers — would be invalidated. "If it's true, then it's truly extraordinary," says John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN.
Ereditato says that he is confident enough in the new result to make it public. The researchers claim to have measured the 730-kilometre trip between CERN and its detector to within 20 centimetres. They can measure the time of the trip to within 10 nanoseconds, and they have seen the effect in more than 16,000 events measured over the past two years. Given all this, they believe the result has a significance of six-sigma — the physicists' way of saying it is certainly correct. The group will present their results tomorrow at CERN, and a preprint of their results will be posted on the physics website ArXiv.org.
