Causes of Neutrino measurement error

4 thoughts on “Causes of Neutrino measurement error”

1. I’ve heard of particles having strangeness and charm. Perhaps you have identified a new distinction in particle physics: politeness. 😉

2. This made my day this morning and I now I am surrounded by polite particles for the rest of the day, which is not too bad. 😉

3. Just to clarify a point (Physics geek-out opportunity); they didn’t actually race a beam of light against a beam of neutrinos. They timed how long the neutrinos took and calculated light *would* have got there slower. The beam goes through 730km of solid rock, so getting vacuum tube that long for a beam of light to go through would be a significantly more complex exercise. On the upside, a lot of the questions would go away if they could actually race the two, since all the distance calculation stuff becomes less important. They might be able to do it with some sort of super-high-energy gamma ray, but building a pointable death ray is generally bad politics.

   I boldly climbed beyond the limit,
   made variant the gauge
   invariant, and in so doing
   mystified the bald.

   My cunning is to hide my self,
   my phase, that which they sought,
   and delay that new
   uncloaking.

   (The experiment isn’t really there to measure the speed of neutrinos, but the flavour change they are expected to undergo between different types of neutrino.)

4. I could have written “I boldly outraced the speed at which all matter, energy and information in the universe can travel”, but it wouldn’t have made a very nice Haiku. 🙂