Scientist proposes that the superluminal neutrinos are merely measuring the true speed of light

On Thursday physicist Susan Gardner of the University of Kentucky proposed in a preprint on the Los Alamos astro-ph website that the neutrinos measured at CERN that appeared to be going faster than light were merely giving us a much more accurate measure of the speed of light.

This is only one of a plethora of papers published this last week on astro-ph discussing and attacking the CERN neutrino results. I expect the scientists will solve this mystery before too long.

Faster than light?

Can neutrinos travel faster than light? After three years of gathering data, an experiment at CERN says they do, though by only a tiny amount.

[Physicist Antonio] 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.

You can download and read a preprint of their paper here.

What I find intriguing about this result, other than its exciting groundbreaking possibilities, is how it illustrates sharply the contrast between normal and healthy science, and the sad and sick state of the field of climate science.
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