Experimentalists Aren’t Idiots: The Neutrino Saga Continues*

Linking not just because Chad links to my post from yesterday but because he goes into more depth than the blurb I whipped up just before going to bed.

But since we’re on the topic, in case anyone is tempted to do yet another “I know the fundamental error you made” article: GPS clocks have their frequency adjusted to compensate for relativity — the clocks in space do keep nominal earth time already. On the ground, they would run slow by about 38 microseconds per day. In space, the gravitational shift is about 45 microseconds faster, opposed somewhat by the kinematic dilation of 7 microseconds. It’s not clear from my very quick scan if the authors of that paper had taken that into account or were trying to argue for some other effect.

Also, people do time transfer (i.e. synchronization) with GPS all the time. It’s called Common View GPS Time Transfer (though you can do it with any satellite that broadcasts). One might have gotten the impression that the neutrino experiment tried something novel to synch up their clocks.

*I am an experimentalist, and I am occasionally an idiot. Nobody is immune, really. But I have excellent colleagues who act as idiocy filters so at work, at least, any work that gets out to the public has been screened.