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Diploid
Cuban



Registered: 01/09/03
Posts: 19,274
Loc: Rabbit Hole
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Superluminal Neutrino Experimenter Resigns
#16019474 - 03/30/12 02:23 PM (11 years, 9 months ago) |
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I think this is a shame. We all fuck up once in a while and everyone is entitled to a second chance. The guy jumped the gun but it's not like anyone got hurt or killed by the mistake. If anything, all the free publicity for CERN and the Gran Sasso lab was a net benefit by bringing high energy physics into the public's short attention span. 
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'Speed of light' experiment professor resigns
By Tushna Commissariat
Late afternoon on a Friday is perhaps not the best time to break important news, but the OPERA collaboration in Italy has got newsrooms buzzing with the resignation of its spokesperson Antonio Ereditato of the University of Bern in Switzerland. Although Reuters was the first to break the story, details were scant, with no comments from OPERA and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy saying only that it “took note” of his resignation. The OPERA collaboration, based at the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy, hit the headlines last September when it claimed that it had observed neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light as they travelled the 730 km from CERN to the Italian lab. However, after having scrutinized all aspects of the experiment in a search of systematic errors, it was discovered that a faulty cable and one other potential source of error could explain the strange results.
When I attempted to reach the OPERA collaboration at the Gran Sasso lab, a lone student answered the phone and politely informed me that he was the only one there. A phone call to the CERN press office proved even more interesting, as the press officer who answered (she refused to give me her name) said that CERN had no comment to make about the resignation as the OPERA experiment is “not a CERN collaboration” and that it “only sends [the researchers] a beam of neutrinos”. This is quite a big change from last year, when CERN seemingly enjoyed the publicity of the headlines crediting it with the discovery.
A call to the INFN press office finally seemed to provide some answers, as a helpful press officer gave me a comment from Antonio Masiero, vice president at the INFN. “Acknowledging the resignation of Professor Antonio Ereditato, spokesperson of the Opera experiment, the INFN hopes that the collaboration will find its unity and new leadership again in pursuing its primary objective, that of observing [neutrino oscillations] starting with μ-type neutrinos coming from CERN. We would like to remind you, as reported in the meeting held at the INFN Gran Sasso laboratory last Wednesday, further and definitive measurements of the speed of neutrinos will be done at Gran Sasso with four experiments, including OPERA, when CERN will send a new neutrino bunched beam at the end of April,” he says.
My colleague James Dacey spoke to Luca Stanco, leader of the OPERA group at the University of Padovo, who gave us some insights into what really led to Ereditato’s resignation. According to Stanco, Ereditato resigned following a vote of no-confidence. Stanco told physicsworld.com that the vote took place last night, with 65% of the collaboration opting for a vote of no-confidence in their spokesperson. He said that while a formal motion of no-confidence required 67% of votes, it seems that Ereditato decided that resignation was the correct thing to do. The reason for the lack of confidence, Stanco says, was that many in the collaboration felt that Ereditato had failed to be sufficiently cautious when discussing the superluminal-neutrino results, having failed to make it clear that these were preliminary. “I was against the way things were communicated,” Stanco says. “In front of the media, we had a duty to be more careful with our language.” Stanco says that it will now take a few weeks to find a new spokesperson. “We have to carry on. We are physicists and we have a duty to continue working on this as OPERA represents a huge investment,” he says.
Undoubtedly, more news and official comments about the resignation will follow in the days to come, but for now it seems that the OPERA researchers are keen to move on, with the upcoming run in May hopefully allowing them to explain their superluminal results once and for all. Posted by Dens Milne on Mar 30, 2012 5:19 PM | Permalink
Physics World
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DieCommie

Registered: 12/11/03
Posts: 29,258
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Re: Superluminal Neutrino Experimenter Resigns [Re: Diploid]
#16019569 - 03/30/12 02:43 PM (11 years, 9 months ago) |
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Weird. Generally scientists understand that mistakes happen a lot in experimental science, a hell of a lot. And mistakes are tolerated pretty well and are almost always assumed. (As opposed to academic dishonesty which is not tolerated at all) Nobody in my dept took the claim that seriously, they know how often mistakes and errors come up and even get published.
But Im not sure that this announcement was 'good'. What I saw of it was fueling a lot of misunderstanding and further confusing what physics and science is to a public that already has a poor grasp of the fields.
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Seuss
Error: divide byzero



Registered: 04/27/01
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Re: Superluminal Neutrino Experimenter Resigns [Re: Diploid] 1
#16019900 - 03/30/12 03:58 PM (11 years, 9 months ago) |
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> The guy jumped the gun but it's not like anyone got hurt or killed by the mistake.
I wouldn't even say he jumped the gun. They published their findings, claimed the findings were improbable, and asked the scientific community for help replicating, or discrediting, the results. This is how science is supposed to work. They did not fabricate anything, mislead anybody, or do anything unethical.
-------------------- Just another spore in the wind.
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Luddite
I watch Fox News


Registered: 03/23/06
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Re: Superluminal Neutrino Experimenter Resigns [Re: Seuss]
#16024367 - 03/31/12 01:40 PM (11 years, 9 months ago) |
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The Lorentz transformations were developed before Einstein and don't apply to superluminal velocities. If v=c then you have zero in the denominator. If v>c then you have an imaginary number in the denominator. Is all of the physics known or is there more? See
FARCE OF PHYSICS http://bourabai.kz/wallace/farce.htm
http://sciliterature.50webs.com/RelativityDebates.htm
Edited by Luddite (03/31/12 01:46 PM)
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Luddite
I watch Fox News


Registered: 03/23/06
Posts: 2,946
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Re: Superluminal Neutrino Experimenter Resigns [Re: Luddite]
#16024388 - 03/31/12 01:44 PM (11 years, 9 months ago) |
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According to Michio Kaku: "Their neutrinos traveled at precisely the speed of light, not faster or slower."
Is this also an impossible result? I thought according to special relativity, nothing can go as fast as the speed of light except light itself.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203986604577253410477762198.html
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Chespirito
Stranger



Registered: 02/13/09
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Re: Superluminal Neutrino Experimenter Resigns [Re: Luddite]
#16024944 - 03/31/12 03:58 PM (11 years, 9 months ago) |
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Quote:
Luddite said: The Lorentz transformations were developed before Einstein
Yes...thus the name
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koraks
Registered: 06/02/03
Posts: 26,667
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Re: Superluminal Neutrino Experimenter Resigns [Re: Diploid]
#16028096 - 04/01/12 07:42 AM (11 years, 9 months ago) |
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Maybe the whole media debacle was just the straw that broke the camel's back. Who knows what the internal track record of Prof. Ereditato was like. I don't think the article tells the full story.
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