An audience member asked whether the team had accounted for the tugging of the moon on the Earth.
“We took data continuously over three years, so this movement should average out,” Auterio said.
His explanations satisfied prominent spectators.
“I want to congratulate you on a beautiful experiment,” said Samuel C.C. Ting, the Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was sitting in the second row of the auditorium. “The experiment is very carefully done, the systematic error very carefully checked.”
Some 15,000 viewers tuned into a webcast of the seminar, compared with the “low hundreds” that view a typical CERN talk, said lab spokesman James Gillies.
“My impression is they did all the reasonable cross-checks,” said one of those viewers, theoretical physicist Matthew Strassler of Rutgers University. “They did a very serious job, it’s clear.”
Still, a yet-unknown error could invalidate the results.
“If you had to bet, you’d bet on some experimental error,” said Lisa Randall, a prominent Harvard University physicist and author of the new book “Knocking on Heaven’s Door .”
Physicists played down speculation about science-fiction scenarios, instant communication and starships zooming at warp speed.
Even if the finding holds, Einstein’s theory could still be true — up to a point, said some physicists. The faster-than-light neutrino might simply be pointing to an extension, not a rewrite of the rule, much as Einstein’s theories extended, not invalidated, Isaac Newton’s laws of motion.
Yet the finding could open up a new understanding of the universe. The neutrinos may have taken a shortcut along a fifth dimension (beyond the three dimensions of space and one of time), as proposed by exotic theories. Another option: There is no ultimate speed limit. Or perhaps there is, but light can’t reach it.
Whatever the case, the OPERA physicists know this: They were not trying to break the speed of light. Their enormous experiment was designed to detect something much more subtle, the predicted flip of one type of neutrino into another. So perhaps they, like many scientists before, have serendipitously glimpsed a frontier.
“There’s the chance that it’s a doorway into something fundamental and deep we don’t know about nature,” Strassler said. “All the great revolutions in science start with an unexpected discrepancy that wouldn’t go away.”
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