the GPS satellites used to measure the departure and arrival times of the racing neutrinos were themselves subject to Einsteinian effects, because they were in motion relative to the experiment. This relative motion wasn’t properly taken into account, but it would have decreased the neutrinos’ apparent journey time. The Dutch scientists calculated the error and came up with the 64 nanoseconds. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s almost exactly the margin by which CERN’s neutrinos were supposed to have beaten light.

Mind you, if this is the ultimate answer to the problem, it won’t be a “gotcha!” moment, because as they were announcing the ‘faster than light’ particles, they were throwing all sorts of qualifiers and asterisks in their explanations, and for anyone that was paying attention, the real question was “how did these results come back wrong” and not “how did we go faster than light?”
via Engadget.

Favorite This!