You See the World Through Your Cynical Eyes

Are we fooling ourselves with faster-than-light neutrinos?

Excellent follow-up to his first post, to which I already linked (under “other commentary”.

What really caught my eye was the “third option” for possible error, where he talks about the possibility of the pulse changing shape and skewing the measurement and we’re fooling ourselves. Because this is nothing new — it has happened in tunneling experiments and with photons in a medium with anomalous dispersion. Those experiments caused the same kind of headlines about relativity being under siege, but turned out to be a confusion between group velocity and phase velocity (which is not limited to c).

The one difference I see here is that the scientists appear to have measured both the leading and trailing edge which would seem to eliminate the errors you get by measuring the peak and having the peak move around relative to the pulse.