And I outlined those other ways—involving the packet loss and re-sending of old data.
The intuition here is hundred percent correct in ruling out any simple mechanistic explanations such as the gap introducing extra distance, the light bouncing off at angle, et cetera. Look what we achieved by converting to meters. We narrowed down the problem to connection protocol. Something has to be re-sending old packets, to introduce that kind of delay. Or, if they send pulses on every tick, which is probably not what they are doing—they must be counting pulses wrongly in presence of inevitable pulse loss. And on top of that they must be unaware of packet loss issue.
That is a much more severe problem than the under-tightening of connections by a contractor, in so much that it implies much higher degree of incompetence among the scientists. That is also, incidentally, significantly less likely.
By the way, they physically carried atomic clock around in one of the replications of experiment, which makes the linked article’s description of issue (the issue with gps to computer wire) entirely null and void.
Don’t take me wrong. I don’t believe in the faster than light neutrinos either. I would also bet money that it is an error. I however am aware that due to strong biases here the ‘explanations’ of the issue are likely to be of very low quality. Especially the ones that are so vague in attribution as “according to sources familiar with experiment”. And I’m not willing to agree with invalid reasoning by those who are explaining the error just because I agree with final conclusion.
Ahh, good. Much better than the article’s link. Didn’t re-read whole discussion. Maybe the cable was not working at all and the clock did not synchronize to GPS at all, or something equally silly. Doesn’t explain how it failed when they physically transported atomic clock.
And I outlined those other ways—involving the packet loss and re-sending of old data.
The intuition here is hundred percent correct in ruling out any simple mechanistic explanations such as the gap introducing extra distance, the light bouncing off at angle, et cetera. Look what we achieved by converting to meters. We narrowed down the problem to connection protocol. Something has to be re-sending old packets, to introduce that kind of delay. Or, if they send pulses on every tick, which is probably not what they are doing—they must be counting pulses wrongly in presence of inevitable pulse loss. And on top of that they must be unaware of packet loss issue.
That is a much more severe problem than the under-tightening of connections by a contractor, in so much that it implies much higher degree of incompetence among the scientists. That is also, incidentally, significantly less likely.
By the way, they physically carried atomic clock around in one of the replications of experiment, which makes the linked article’s description of issue (the issue with gps to computer wire) entirely null and void.
Don’t take me wrong. I don’t believe in the faster than light neutrinos either. I would also bet money that it is an error. I however am aware that due to strong biases here the ‘explanations’ of the issue are likely to be of very low quality. Especially the ones that are so vague in attribution as “according to sources familiar with experiment”. And I’m not willing to agree with invalid reasoning by those who are explaining the error just because I agree with final conclusion.
There’s a CERN press release about that.
Ahh, good. Much better than the article’s link. Didn’t re-read whole discussion. Maybe the cable was not working at all and the clock did not synchronize to GPS at all, or something equally silly. Doesn’t explain how it failed when they physically transported atomic clock.