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Message: <blockquote data-quote="freyar" data-source="post: 5834524" data-attributes="member: 40227">No, unlike some incorrect statements in initial news reports, it's unclear how much the two different equipment errors affected the measurement or if there's something else going on.  At the moment, all that's known is that there are problems with two pieces of equipment that could have had effects on the measurement that are larger than the purported disagreement with relativity.  I should also mention that the "faulty cable" error isn't that the cable was loose but that the perfectly tight cable leads to different readings depending on what angle it took at the connection.  So it's something that could have changed if someone walked past and bumped something gently.  Very subtle issue.However, you are both getting something a little backward.  The point is not that there is a measurement so we are obligated to hypothesize an explanation.  The point is that any measurement has two types of errors: statistical, which just has to do with the fact that it's impossible to repeat any measurement process perfectly identically; and systematic, which has to do with how well the equipment works (roughly speaking).  What OPERA is now saying is that they had (at best) dramatically underestimated their systematic error.  If they had understood about these two pieces of equipment errors last fall, they would never have announced a discrepancy with Einstein's relativity because their measurement agrees with relativity to within experimental error.  So we don't need to "prove" that the cable exactly accounts for the 60 nanosecond difference.  What we know already is that it introduced an even larger error than the purported signal.  In an attempt to find a discrepancy with relativity, OPERA (and other experiments) will have to redo the entire experiment after improving their equipment to reduce the systematic error.Incidentally, we should also remember that OPERA was designed to measure something else, which it did quite well, so it was a successful experiment.</blockquote>

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