Neutrino noise

On September 9, amazing news came from Italy, from the Gran Sasso underground laboratory. The OPERA collaboration, which is engaged in catching neutrinos that come from the SPS accelerator at CERN, after repeated measurements of their speed, produced the result: neutrinos move at superluminal speeds!

Of course, most physicists, and even the members of the collaboration themselves, are full of skepticism: most likely, we are talking about some unaccounted for systematic errors. Indeed, otherwise such a conclusion would affect the very foundation of science. Estimates of the speed of these particles coming from the famous supernova SN 1987A are also known; They, of course, do not exceed the speed of light. However, it is very important that we are now talking about more than just rumors, opinions or preliminary press releases. The archive of electronic preprints ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 ) has already posted a finished article, signed by members of a respected and authoritative international collaboration (including Russian scientists), containing a detailed analysis of a wide variety of sources of errors and uncertainties. Conclusion: exceeding the speed of light is small, but statistically significant. The neutrinos traveled the 730 km that separates the Gran Sasso detector from CERN 60 nanoseconds faster than if they had traveled at the speed of light.

It is already clear that this event will go down in history, regardless of whether some real interesting effect is revealed behind all this or whether experimental errors unknown to us are simply discovered. There is too much noise both in the media and in the scientific community itself. The socio-psychological problems that arise when such news is disseminated are also quite worthy of study. Interesting are the collisions that arise in the scientific community when deciding to publish data that is ready to overthrow the foundations of the theory.