Photo: Part of the neutrino detetctor, Gran Sasso, Italy 

  Neutrinos go faster than light? Was the OPERA Group right in publishing their results? They have been criticized by distinguished scientists for jumping the gun. This type of sensationalism only erodes the public trust in science, they say. In the end, the principles of relativity hold paramount, so why confuse the general population with such results? More than two decades old, the bitter memory of “Cold Fusion” is still fresh within the scientific community. The follies of particle physicists can inadvertently influence the public opinion on global climate change which climate scientists have researched so diligently to prove. But is science so insecure?

Science is supposed to be simple. Unfortunately, the process of science is complex. It is so complex that the OPERA Group itself cannot find its own mistakes. So they put everything (almost) in a paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897). There must be a mistake somewhere and the community of world physicists should have found unambiguously where the mistake lies. Have they synchronized their watches accurately or do their likelihood analysis of the dataset was done properly? Other scientists can suggest these overlooked errors and that is what they are doing. Dozens of papers are pouring into the arxiv site (xxx.lanl.gov). This is a site where researchers can publish their work without going through a peer-review process that may hold up their papers for months (sometimes years). The site is accessible to the general public.

The papers fall into a few categories:

  i) papers showing how OPERA results directly contradict previous scientific results, for example, the neutrinos from the supernova 1987A arrived almost simultaneouly with the light. If OPERA results are right they should have arrived four days early,  

ii) papers showing how, from theoretical considerations, superluminal neutrinos are not possible (for example, superluminal neutrinos should have emitted Cherenkov radiaton and thus lose all their energies to travel at high speeds),  

iii) papers addressing technical aspects of the experiment (it’s possible that the OPERA Group simply did not synchronize their clocks or they have discounted relativistic effects of the GPS satellites with respect to the ground),  

iv) papers addressing statistical loopholes in their likelihood data analysis (this is my favourite, there is another paper suggesting beam variation, the neutrino generation time is not properly fixed),  

v) papers suggesting ideas how the OPERA results can be reconciled with the existing science. For examples, neutrinos traveling superluminal within matter (earth’s crust), popping in and out of another dimension where it can travel faster than light, pathlength increase due to general relativistic effects, etc. And then there was a paper suggesting that the superluminal neutrino speed is the truer measure of Einstein’s limiting speed.  

Whatever is the case, this all exhibits the trmendous power of democracy and internet. The archive concept has taken root and has bypassed the archaic peer-reviewed process. Originally initiated at Los Alamos, the arxiv is now hosted at Cornell University (Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv). Searching for OPERA neutrino papers, I came across contributors from across the globe: Germany, France, Lithuania, Mali, Mexico, United States, India, China, Slovenia, and other countries. Their papers were not rejected because they were not well known and had not attended international conferences or failed to be part of influential scientific cliques. The ideas are free-flowing. There are crazy ideas among these, but at least these ideas are exposed to all their peers, not only to a select set of judges. And we - as non-specialists, can get a glimpse of this extraordinary process. This can only strengthen the way we do science. If Satyen Bose had access to arxiv, he did not have to wait to get Einstein’s blessings to publish his papers.

email: dipenb@gmail.com