Following are the serious physics based remarks, analysis or studies I have made so far on OPERA collaboration’s experimental result or ones that can be read in this context. This measurement has surpassed in my opinion all bounds of doubt and uncertainty. What remains is an anomaly, in this article I will give some suggestions on how anomalies if any can be addressed and make other pertinent remarks.
Before that here are the serious articles on OPERA so far — only 1 humor based article is on OPERA with popular musical analogies, I will mention it just for the heck of it and presume it does not take any one away from scientific context, but then serious and good quality experiments aren’t necessarily understood by serious physicists who keep on making vague comments which is more of a danger toward science than just humor:
[in order of chronology, into past]
Article 1: The time energy uncertainty relation.
Article 2: Further OPERA of a comprehensible universe — the current blog you are reading.
Article 3: The sociology of skepticism.
Article 4: Why scientists think photon is mass-less.
Article 5: What do we know about photon ? (Light).
Article 6: Why the neutrino and photon break-up? — You may avoid this it’s just humor.
Article 7: Fundamental things you should know about the neutrinos.
Article 8: Just a few implications of the OPERA neutrino result.
Article 9: The OPERA neutrino results.
Article 10: Is a photon always moving at the speed-of-light? (current title: What are photons) — This one is before I knew anything called OPERA experiment exists, although written less than two weeks ago.
Article 11: Why nothing moves faster than light? — on my main blog site, written April this year.
Now back to this article:
1. How to address the issue if this result is an anomaly — a correctly measured anomaly at that). Instead of depending on another experiment the OPERA can simply divide it’s ~16000 neutrinos into 16 groups of 1000 neutrinos each, — or is it 15000, does not matter as far as the idea goes.
If a systematic glitch is present it will only show up in 1 or more than 1 group. If you think it is present in all 16 groups you are saying it will be present in 16 million neutrinos as well, hence neutrinos bought a glitch from Walmart so that photons can not pace beyond the neutrino.
It’s like neutrinos taking drugs to pace beyond photons, but they are allowed to do that. Why is photon such a lazy guy, he can buy his favorite bike, who stopped him before the Olympics? The conditions of the experiment are equally affecting both neutrino and photon baseline, a feature only good experimentalists understand why the systematic error issue of GPS clock etc is a meaningless diversion from the real issue.
2. The experimentalist in me says: the OPERA experimental measurement is correct. The systematic errors are in control, — finding more systematic error is your problem, the statistics is in control — finding more statistics is your problem, the mean value is sharp and completely out of the bound of the errors, — you can quote the mean as a precise result.