Scientific Honor and Elegance in Physics — when Avarice and Self-Glorification Take a Vacation and Neutrinos Come Out to Play — Some People Who Still Do It the Way It’s “Spozed” to Be Done

© 2011 Peter Free

 

28 December 2011

 

 

A parable about the value of honest truth-seeking

 

Recently, scientists at the OPERA experiment found what they thought were neutrinos going faster than the speed of light.

 

Note

“OPERA” stands for Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Racking Apparatus.

 

CERN (Geneva) and the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (Gran Sasso is a mountain in Italy) are cooperating in the experiment, which times neutrino transit times over the 730 kilometer (approximately 454 mile) distance between them.

 

What happened afterward lends itself to parables about the importance of honest truth-seeking.

 

 

Citation

 

Adrian Cho, Superluminal Neutrinos: Where Does the Time Go? Science 334(6060): 1200-1201 (02 December 2011)

 

 

Part 1 — truth is important

 

Since the purported discovery violated the light speed maximum required by relativity theory, OPERA researchers published their results and opened their experimental setup to other investigators for suggestions on what they might have done wrong.

 

That, in itself, is ethically old fashioned in an avaricious era that prizes often duplicitous secrecy for the purpose of achieving fame and profit.

 

 

Part 2 — add the twist of scientific elegance that honest publication prompted

 

As Science writer Adrian Cho made clear, finding the causes of error in (i) a complicated experiment that looked at (ii) elusive particles traveling at (iii) fantastic speeds may be impossible.

 

On cue, enter Ramanath Cowsik, Shmuel Nussinov, and Utpal Sarkar.  The trio came up with scientific reasoning, which appears to demonstrate that — even if faster-than-light neutrinos do exist — they are going to be near impossible to find, given the limits of current equipment and knowledge.

 

 

Citation

 

Ramanath Cowsik, Shmuel Nussinov, and Utpal Sarkar, Superluminal Neutrinos at OPERA Confront Pion Decay Kinematics, Physics Review Letters 107(25): 251801 (16 December 2011)

 

 

The relativity math behind their “near impossible to prove” claim

 

Lead author Cowsik explained to writer Diana Lutz that, as neutrino speed increases, the lifetime of its parent pion increases.  And the energy carried by the neutrino decreases.

 

Which I interpret to mean that the temporal instances in which the speedy neutrinos can be detected decline and their increasingly tiny masses simultaneously escape our current ability to detect them.  So, with increasing velocity, the particles become harder to detect and the intervals in which to “see” them virtually close.

 

“We are saying that, given physics as we know it today, it should be hard to produce any neutrinos with superluminal velocities, and Cohen and Glashow are saying that even if you did, they’d quickly radiate away their energy and slow down,” Cowsik says.

 

Furthermore, thinks Cowsik, cosmic ray research seems to nix the idea of faster-than-light neutrinos:

 

“IceCube has seen neutrinos with energies 10,000 times higher than those the OPERA experiment is creating . . . . Thus, the energies of their parent pions should be correspondingly high.

 

“Simple calculations, based on the conservation of energy and momentum, dictate that the lifetimes of those pions should be too long for them ever to decay into superluminal neutrinos.

 

“But the observation of high-energy neutrinos by IceCube indicates that these high-energy pions do decay according to the standard ideas of physics, generating neutrinos whose speed approaches that of light but never exceeds it.

 

© 2011 Diana Lutz, Pions don’t want to decay into faster-than-light neutrinos, study finds, Washington University – St. Louis (23 December 2011) (paragraph split)

 

Note

 

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is in Antarctica.  It looks for trillion electron volt (TeV) point sources of neutrinos in the universe.

 

A “TeV” is 1 teraelectron volt, or 1 x 1012 electron volts, or one trillion eV.

 

 

The moral? — If you are tired of the lying con men who run the nation, look to particle physics for instances of honorable truth-seeking

 

Or watch sports.