ThinkerEmeritus wrote:It would be nice if you could set up a direct "race" between the photons and the neutrinos, for hidden errors would be much less likely.
But part of the reason why these results are so difficult to believe is that we have done just this (or, rather, not so much "done" as luckily stumbled upon).
Supernova 1987A. The photons and neutrinos from an emission source 160,000+ lightyears away arrived at essentially exactly the same time. If there was any significant deviation between the speeds of photons and neutrinos, that is where we would have noticed it. 160,000 lightyears worth of chance for the neutrinos to put some distance between themselves and photons trumps 730 kilometers.
Of course, as I understand it, there are some key differences between those kinds of neutrinos and the kinds the OPERA test was using, but... we'll that's really as far as I understand it, at the moment.
That's pretty close. The only correction needed is that they did not arrive at the same time. The neutrinos did indeed arrive first, however they did so not because they traveled faster than C, but because the light from the supernova was delayed by a couple of hours on its way out of the supernova. However, and this is the key, the difference seen at CERN would have resulted in the neutrinos arriving more than a year ahead of the light.
From there, you're spot on: They involved different flavors of Neutrinos at vastly different energies. Therefore, this leaves room for both to be valid, but for the Neutrinos from the OPERA experiment to behave differently.
Back to edgey: Neutrinos are completely neutral. As such, they do not interact in any way with the Electro-Magnetic or Strong-Nuclear forces. This leaves only Gravity and the Weak-Nuclear force.
My primary (personal, so not entirely valuable ) theories, from most to least likely, are:
1)An unnoticed error in the CERN experiment. They were testing for something different, so it's not impossible for something related to this not having sufficient accuracy.
2)Neutrinos travel through a 5th dimension in some fashion, allowing for some sort of slight short-cut. They travel through that dimension at the speed of light, but for whatever reason, the distance is shorter. Much as Docmordrid said.
3)It's actually us that travels through the extra dimension. Instead of only occasionally doing this, in a sort of shortcut, we actually slowly travel through it on a constant basis much in the way we travel through time. For normal matter, photons, energy, etc. this would need to be a constant amount of travel ( else we would have previously detected it ), but for some reason Neutrinos can slow down or stop moving in the 5th dimension, allowing for a greater speed in the 3 spatial dimensions without affecting their travel through time.
4)There is something fundamentally wrong with our interpretation of the speed of light. Physics has a flaw at the very core, and sweeping changes unfold in a change not seen since the discovery of Quantum Mechanics or Relativity. (I really doubt this one. There's just too much that works out so nicely for the core to be wrong.)
I am also mulling over possible involvement of Negative-Matter (Matter with a negative mass), but this is tricky to say the least. A particle with Negative Mass would travel faster than C, and therefore backwards in time, but it would also interact opposite to normal ( If you plug a negative mass into any equation, it results in a velocity in the opposite direction of normal. ) This causes things to get rather confusing, and it's late at night...so I'll just leave it at that for now.