(March 19, 2016 at 12:36 pm)Alex K Wrote: Jehanne,
the Opera neutrino time of flight measurement was rather different in character for several reasons - first of all it was just one number, a timing measurement. The LHC detectors register complex events, in this case with two high energy photons coming out of a collision, and there is little doubt that the excess as seen has indeed occurred - the one opera timing number was off because of a faulty connector. Events as we see them here cannot just be faked by a simple fault in the machine like a loose wire. One more difference: having a new particle that would make such a signature in the LHC is theoretically quite plausible (i.e. it is not hard to write down a mathematically consistent model that produces such effects) whereas I myself have published a paper back in the day showing that it is basically theoretically impossible to have superluminal neutrinos the way Opera seemed to observe them for reasons I can go into if you're interested.
The Opera superluminal neutrino measurement was wrong due to a loose optical connector, this signal here is probably nothing because it will turn out to be an accidental statistical upward fluctuation rather than a systematic error in the experiments.
It was not, however, an overnight correction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-tha...no_anomaly
A significant number of physicists believed in their faster-than-light result for over an entire year, even to the point of replicating it.
