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Superluminal results

Well, this article is going to need some updating soon. OPERA is about to become either very famous or very INfamous in the physics world.--Grapplequip (formerly LAR) (talk) 23:06, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

I added mention of the news in this article. Unfortunately I don't know enough about OPERA (or have time right now) to check what else is out of date in this article, so I've left the "Out of date" tag intact. --Grapplequip (formerly LAR) (talk) 00:03, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

On second thought, as no one has explained why the article is outdated, I've decided to removed the outdated tag. It seems odd to simultaneously have "current event" and "outdated" tags on the article. I'm going to add a current event tag at the top of the article now that information about is in the lead. Note, I have every intention of fixing the info I've added in the article, as well as removing the section in the lead, if this experimental result turns out to be false, which I fully expect to happen. For the moment, however, it is big news.--Grapplequip (formerly LAR) (talk) 00:13, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

The paper seems to diagram a "proton beam" traveling all the way to Italy through the Earth. This surely can not be correct, so how are they keeping their clocks up to date with the required accuracy? Hcobb (talk) 16:23, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

The beam passes through several hundred kilometers of the Earth's crust. What exactly is your confusion? --OuroborosCobra (talk) 17:08, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

Neutrinos can pass right through the Earth, but protons? Hcobb (talk) 18:46, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

The section states: "This result has not been detected by previous experiments; for instance, in 2007, Fermilab reported results consistent with neutrinos traveling at lightspeed." This is incorrect, at least the first sentence. While the results were certainly not 6-sigma, they did give a velocity higher than the speed of light:

A total of 473 Far Detector neutrino events was used to measure (v-c)/c = 5.1 +/- 2.9 x 10^-5 (at 68% C.L.).

See also this this science blog: One experiment based out of Chicago, a few years ago, found marginal evidence that neutrinos might move just a tiny bit faster than the speed of light, at 1.000051 (+/- 0.000029) c.

Those results can be called consistent with the speed of light, but that's because it was a low (not even two) sigma event, meaning there's a chance of maybe 3% for these results to occur by accident. DS Belgium (talk) 19:01, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages articles are about WP:Verifiability, not truth. The truth that the scientist speaking on behalf of Opera was being very conservative in his quote about Fermi isn't very relevant (at 2 sigma). It doesn't change what he said. He claimed that Fermi's results may contradict OPERA's. That he said it is more important than whether or not there actually is a contradiction. He says that there was. --Wragge (talk) 22:32, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

Clarification to earlier point: an interpretation by a participant in a WP:SECONDARY source trumps any WP:OR or blog opinions, even/especially when those are based on primary source data. --Wragge (talk) 22:48, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

Could the timing be affected by gravitational time dilation? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.80.119.67 (talk) 00:41, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

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