It’s great to have Eric P. and W.L.W. participating here. They are two of the keenest analysts of the planet, especially in regard to the holes in CERN science.

Nevertheless given the revolutionary nature of the proposition made by the CERN researchers, they ought to have pointed to the two loopholes addressed here. Then there would have been no publicity whatsoever.

Conversely, the danger they are precipitating the planet into, by not replying to given scientific evidence, indeed puts CERN and Europe into a light which will be maximally hard to repair.

In terms of the statistics CERN claims that their statistical evaluation involves sufficient statistical significance. The problem is the indirectness of the time determination (particularly) and the uncertainties of the models involved.

Eric

“SN1987A, A Retrospective Analysis Regarding Neutrino Speed”

In 1987 the physics community was surprised by a fortuitous supernova.[1] The light from the supernova reached Earth on February 23, 1987, and as it was the year’s first supernova, it was designated SN1987A. The parent star was located approximately 168,000 light-years away, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is the Milky Way’s companion dwarf galaxy. It became visible to the naked eye in Earth’s southern hemisphere.

In this observation, a star core collapsed and released a lot of energy. Most of the excess energy is predicted in theory to be radiated away in a ‘cooling phase’ massive burst of neutrinos/anti-neutrinos formed from pair-production (80–90% of the energy release) and these neutrinos would be of all 3 flavors, both neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, while some 10–20% of the energy is released as accretion phase neutrinos via reactions of electrons plus protons forming neutrons plus neutrinos, or positrons plus neutrons forming protons plus neutrinos (1 flavor, neutrino and anti-neutrino). The observations are also consistent with the models’ estimates of a total neutrino count of 1058 with a total energy of 1046 joules.[2]

Approximately three hours before the visible light from SN 1987A reached the Earth, a burst of neutrinos was observed at those three separate neutrino observatories. This is due to neutrino emission (which occurs simultaneously with core collapse) preceding the emission of visible light (which occurs only after the shock wave reaches the stellar surface). At 7:35 a.m. Universal time, Kamiokande II detected 11 antineutrinos, IMB 8 antineutrinos and Baksan 5 antineutrinos, in a burst lasting less than 13 seconds.

In this respect, a point that deserves to be stressed is that all 3 detectors observed a relatively large number of events in the first one second of data-taking, about 40% of the total counts (6 events in Kamiokande-II, 3 events in IMB and 2 events in Baksan), while the remaining 60% were spread out over the course of the next 12 seconds.

In other words, these neutrinos travelled a total distance of 5.3 X 10^12 light seconds (168,000 light years), with almost half originating at roughly the same time (within about a 1 second burst of neutrino emission), and all arrived at earth (the light-transit time of earth’s diameter is « 1 second and is not a factor due to the spacing of the detectors) within about 1 second of each other. In other words, they all travelled at close to the same speed to within nearly 13 orders of magnitude (5.3 X 10^12 seconds/1 second), far greater than any other measurement precision ever made for the speed of light. And, they all travelled at very close to the speed of light (travelling the same distance as the photons that reached Earth 3 hours later) at a speed consistent to c to within about 1 part per 500 million).

One would expect that since the neutrinos are emitted with potentially a range of energies, that their transit time would have exhibited a range of speeds (all in the 0.9999+ c speed range) if they were sub-luminal particles. While it has been believed that because the total ‘rest-energy’ of a neutrino is on the order of a few eV, while the rest-mass of an electron is about 511 KeV, neutrinos would all travel at close to c if they have mass and high-energy. But the energy they carry is sufficient to bring their speed to near c to only about .999999+ c if they are mass-particles, and the range in energies from pair-production should produce a spread in those speeds, albeit at many significant figures beyond the first few 9s. The calculated energy is indeed high, but not infinite. But that is not what was observed. They were observed to have all travelled at the same speed to 13 significant figures. In other words, had they had slight variations in their speed all slightly less than c, they would have had a large spread in the arrival time at Earth, on the order of days to years. The actual observation is far more consistent with neutrinos as having zero rest mass, and traveling at c, and appears wholly inconsistent with having a rest-mass and ejected with a spectrum of varying energies.

Let us briefly review the history of the discovery of neutrinos.

Historically, the study of beta decay provided the first physical evidence of the neutrino. In 1911 Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn performed an experiment that showed that the energies of electrons emitted by beta decay had a continuous, rather than discrete, spectrum. Unlike alpha particles that are emitted with a discrete energy, allowing for a recoil nucleus to conserve energy and momentum, this continuous energy spectrum to a maxium energy was in apparent contradiction to the law of conservation of energy and momentum for a two-body system, as it appeared that energy was lost in the beta decay process, and momentum not conserved.

Between 1920–1927, Charles Drummond Ellis (along with James Chadwick and colleagues) established clearly that the beta decay spectrum is really continuous. In a famous letter written in 1930, Wolfgang Pauli suggested that in addition to electrons and protons, the nuclei of atoms also contained an extremely light, neutral particle. He proposed calling this the ‘neutron’. He suggested that this ‘neutron’ was also emitted during beta decay and had simply not yet been observed. Chadwick subsequently discovered a massive neutral particle in the nucleus, which he called the “neutron”, which is our modern neutron. In 1931 Enrico Fermi renamed Pauli’s ‘neutron’ to neutrino (Italian for little neutral one), and in 1934 Fermi published a very successful model of beta decay in which neutrinos were produced, which would be particles of zero rest mass but carrying momentum and energy and travelling at c, or very low-mass particles traveling at nearly c.[3]

Before the idea of neutrino oscillations came up, it was generally assumed that neutrinos, as the particle associated with weak interactions, travel at the speed of light with momentum and energy but no rest-mass, similarly to photons traveling at the speed of light with momentum and energy but no rest-mass and associated with electron-magnetic interactions. The question of neutrino velocity is closely related to their mass. According to relativity, if neutrinos carry a mass, they cannot reach the speed of light, but if they are mass-less, they must travel at the speed of light.

In other words, in order to conserve both momentum and energy during beta decay, the theoretical particle called a ‘neutrino’ was predicted. It was presumed that the neutrino either travelled at the speed of light and had zero rest mass (most dominant theory until the 1980s) but momentum (analogous to the electromagnetic photon, which travels at the speed of light, with momentum, but with zero rest-mass), or else it travelled at near-relativistic speeds with very small rest-mass (the less popular and unproven theory).

However, with the apparent recent discovery of neutrino oscillation, it became popular though not universal to assert that neutrinos have a very small rest mass: “Neutrinos are most often created or detected with a well defined flavor (electron, muon, tau). However, in a phenomenon known as neutrino flavor oscillation, neutrinos are able to oscillate between the three available flavors while they propagate through space. Specifically, this occurs because the neutrino flavor eigenstates are not the same as the neutrino mass eigenstates (simply called 1, 2, 3). This allows for a neutrino that was produced as an electron neutrino at a given location to have a calculable probability to be detected as either a muon or tau neutrino after it has traveled to another location. This quantum mechanical effect was first hinted by the discrepancy between the number of electron neutrinos detected from the Sun’s core failing to match the expected numbers, dubbed as the “solar neutrino problem”. In the Standard Model the existence of flavor oscillations implies nonzero differences between the neutrino masses, because the amount of mixing between neutrino flavors at a given time depends on the differences in their squared-masses. There are other possibilities in which neutrino can oscillate even if they are massless. If Lorentz invariance is not an exact symmetry, neutrinos can experience Lorentz-violating oscillations.“[4]

Thus, observed oscillations in ‘flavor’ (type of neutrino based on origin source) suggested that neutrinos had a small rest mass, and therefore according to Einstein had to travel at less than c.

But do they?

“Lorentz-violating neutrino oscillation refers to the quantum phenomenon of neutrino oscillations described in a framework that allows the breakdown of Lorentz invariance. Today, neutrino oscillation or change of one type of neutrino into another is an experimentally verified fact; however, the details of the underlying theory responsible for these processes remain an open issue and an active field of study. The conventional model of neutrino oscillations assumes that neutrinos are massive, which provides a successful description of a wide variety of experiments; however, there are a few oscillation signals that cannot be accommodated within this model, which motivates the study of other descriptions. In a theory with Lorentz violation neutrinos can oscillate with and without masses and many other novel effects described below appear. The generalization of the theory by incorporating Lorentz violation has shown to provide alternative scenarios to explain all the established experimental data through the construction of global models.“[5]

If they have a rest mass, and travel at near-c but slightly below c, there should be a slight variation in their speeds based upon their total energy (most of which would be kinetic energy, not rest-mass energy). In other words, various high-energy neutrinos would travel at, for example, .99999997 c or .99999995 c, etc., and this variation in speed, however slight, should be detectable.

But the variation in neutrino velocity from c, in the 1987a data, was at most about 1/490,000,000 (3 hours/168,000 years). It was actually much closer to c than that (and most likely at c) because of the head-start the neutrinos received over the photons. More importantly, their close arrival time (40% within 1 second) implies an identical speed to 13 orders of magnitude. While they are all released as essentially prompt neutrinos, the remaining energy of the core implosion should have taken a significant amount of time to churn through the overlying massive amount of star. While one might argue that it would take less than 3 hours for the core implosion energy to reach the surface of the star, and then start its race to Earth with the previously released neutrinos, I believe this has been fairly well presented previously in the astrophysics community to be a reasonable value.

The calculations for the volume of the star that actually underwent core implosion shows such a volume at about 60 km diameter, or about 1/100 light-second, and would not have been a factor in the timing of the arrival of the neutrinos.

Most of the neutrinos released are not from the proton/electron or positron/neutron fusion releasing electron neutrinos and anti-neutrinos. Rather, the energy of the degeneracy creates neutrino/anti-neutrino pairs of all 3 flavors, which travel in opposite direction (to conserve momentum). Most of the neutrinos released were therefore from this pair-production, which would have occurred relatively simultaneously (to within a few seconds) within the volume of that imploding core.

So, the spread in arrival time of the neutrinos on Earth, measured at 13 seconds, is accounted almost entirely due to the time for the pair-production and cooling to be completed. In other words, all of the neutrinos that travelled those 168,000 light years travelled at exactly the same speed without regard to their energy to within 13 orders of magnitude.

So the 1987a data show both an extreme example of exactly the same flight of time without regard to energy, and a speed almost exactly equal to c to within far better than 1/500,000,000 based on the 3 hour discrepancy of the early arrival of the neutrinos compared to the photons after travelling for some 168,000 years.

This data strongly suggests that neutrinos travel at light speed with energy and momentum, but no rest mass, as originally surmised; and not at slightly below c with some slight rest-mass, as has been the notion as of late (since flavor oscillation was recently detected).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_1987A

[2] Improved analysis of SN1987A antineutrino events. G. Pagliaroli, F. Vissani, M.L. Costantini, A. Ianni, Astropart.Phys.31:163–176,2009.

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_decay

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino

[5]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz-violating_neutrino_oscillations

Otto

‘Luca Stanco, a senior member of the Opera collaboration (who also worked on the ZEUS experiment with me several years ago). He points out that although he is a member of Opera, he did not sign the arXiv preprint because while he supported the seminar and release of results, he considers the analysis “preliminary” due at least in part to worries like those I describe, and that it has been presented as being more robust than he thinks it is. Four other senior members of Opera also removed their names from the author list for this result.

He wished to comment, and agreed to me adding this text.’

Returning to my argument above (my 2 other doubts I had mentioned to Otto are in a broad sense relevant to above), it may well be the main distance is accurate as apparently comparing both the gps ‘l1 and L2 signals can allow for addressing atmospheric induced delay, though while not mentioned in the paper. This may explain the <2cm coordinate variations for what seems to be just one site at Gran Sasso Laboratories over a 2/3 year period of paper. Another method called rtk seems available to their gps antenna which improves accuracy by signalling with nearby ground stations.

Eric

Hence CERN has come heavily into the defense once more, this time not with recklessness displayed before the whole world but with bue-eyedness displayed before the whole world.