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<blockquote data-quote="freyar" data-source="post: 5735917" data-attributes="member: 40227">Absolutely.&nbsp; They wouldn't have brought it up 2 months ago if they hadn't checked everything they could think of to the extent possible with their experiment.&nbsp; They've since done a modified version of their experiment which is actually a bit better.&nbsp; One thing we are waiting for is for a couple of other experimental collaborations in other labs (one in the US, one in Japan) to run similar experiments.&nbsp; But the point is that OPERA was not designed to measure neutrino speeds, so there are a lot of fairly subtle things that could go wrong.&nbsp; As for what this could be, that's quite complicated.&nbsp; I've been keeping one eye on papers about this, and there have been many odd ideas, most of which I'd classify as so much garbage (I refereed a short paper on this recently, and it didn't even try to do physics, just listed functions to fit data points).&nbsp; There are reasons it is so difficult.&nbsp; One is that there are very strict limits on low-energy neutrino speed from a supernova observed in 1987.&nbsp; Another is that, in most theories of superluminal neutrinos, there is a process that would rapidly reduce the energy of the superluminal neutrinos as they fly around.&nbsp; So you have to turn that off.&nbsp; I'm not sure I've seen any idea that does both of those things successfully.&nbsp; I suppose my favorite ideas are that there is some new field that exists near matter but not in space (attracted by gravity, sort of) that interacts with neutrinos but not much else or that neutrinos alone can move into an extra dimension, where the &quot;speed of light&quot; is just a little bigger.&nbsp; But who knows?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="freyar, post: 5735917, member: 40227"] Absolutely. They wouldn't have brought it up 2 months ago if they hadn't checked everything they could think of to the extent possible with their experiment. They've since done a modified version of their experiment which is actually a bit better. One thing we are waiting for is for a couple of other experimental collaborations in other labs (one in the US, one in Japan) to run similar experiments. But the point is that OPERA was not designed to measure neutrino speeds, so there are a lot of fairly subtle things that could go wrong. As for what this could be, that's quite complicated. I've been keeping one eye on papers about this, and there have been many odd ideas, most of which I'd classify as so much garbage (I refereed a short paper on this recently, and it didn't even try to do physics, just listed functions to fit data points). There are reasons it is so difficult. One is that there are very strict limits on low-energy neutrino speed from a supernova observed in 1987. Another is that, in most theories of superluminal neutrinos, there is a process that would rapidly reduce the energy of the superluminal neutrinos as they fly around. So you have to turn that off. I'm not sure I've seen any idea that does both of those things successfully. I suppose my favorite ideas are that there is some new field that exists near matter but not in space (attracted by gravity, sort of) that interacts with neutrinos but not much else or that neutrinos alone can move into an extra dimension, where the "speed of light" is just a little bigger. But who knows? [/QUOTE]

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