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How many of these guys are GPS satellite engineers? It sounds like they falsely assumed that the GPS system would take care of all relativistic effects and they
by drzaiusapelord 15y ago
How many of these guys are GPS satellite engineers? It sounds like they falsely assumed that the GPS system would take care of all relativistic effects and they can just use absolute time for measurement.
The GPS system was not remotely designed for this level of accuracy. The issue here could really be a misconception of how well GPS works and what it was designed to do. GPS, like all technology, has a distinct difference between theory and practice and is also engineered for certain use cases. It may be that no one really thought about this stuff until now because we're talking such tiny increments of time over such large distances.
Regardless, its early in the game to know whats going on, but I'd be really surprised if suddenly neutrinos were FTL and no one noticed until sometime this year. This is starting to look like another case of super-smart over-specialized eggheads making assumptions and not seeing the big picture, like when NASA/Lockheed lost the Mars Climate Orbitor over imperial to metric conversions.
- starwed 15y ago>This is starting to look like another case of super-smart over-specialized eggheads making assumptions and not seeing the big picture What a fucked way to spin this -- the group asked for outside help in explaining their results and finding any mistakes.
- drzaiusapelord 15y agoIf these guys were humble researchers unsure of their results, perhaps RUNNING TO THE MEDIA AND SCREAMING ABOUT BREAKING THE LIGHT BARRIER should have been agenda item #8484 not #1. Seriously, if you're claiming you're doing FTL, asking for outside help isn't some noble act, its pretty much required. The idea that these guys are infallible and systemic errors never happen is incredibly naive. Christ, remind me never to get between nerds and their starship Enterprise fantasies.
- alphaBetaGamma 15y agoThe gps receivers they are using are NOT $200 off the shelf components. I am pretty sure that when you buy such equipment you will have long discussions with the GPS engineers from the firm. The GPS receivers they used are form Septentrio, and this guys know their shit. I can't find a reference right now, but if I remember correctly one of their claims to fame is detecting an error in GLONASS, the Russian gps system.
- CamperBob 15y agoNote also that a $100 Trimble Thunderbolt available on eBay can get you reliable timing results to within about +/- 20 nanoseconds, given a good GPS antenna. Compensating for special relativity in the timing calculations was a job that had to be done, and done perfectly, long before the first GPS satellite was launched. My guess is that the bug will indeed turn out to be a relativity issue, but a consequence of GR rather than SR, arising from the fact that the detector cavern is under 1400 meters of rock.
- kmm 15y agoI'm afraid that unless the Monolith is somewhere under Gran Sasso, those effects are completely negligible. The time scales of the experiment are very short indeed (1e-9 seconds), but the influence of General Relativity is even smaller (1e-15 seconds). The point to remember that there are so many possible factors that could mess up their results, that the error estimates that were published by the OPERA team were way too low.