The experimenters and their colleagues at other experiments know this perfectly well, of course. Extracting the signal is a matter of using statistics over many such events - a tricky business. (If you are measuring something incorrectly, it doesn’t matter that you measure it very carefully.) In particular, the mismatch between the expected and observed timing amounts to tens of nanoseconds but any individual “event” takes the form of a pulse that is spread out over thousands of nanoseconds. some unknown miscalibration somewhere in the experiment or analysis pipeline. There is another looming source of possible error: a “systematic effect,” i.e. But that doesn’t mean it’s overwhelmingly likely that the result is real it just means it’s overwhelmingly unlikely that the result is simply a statistical fluctuation. The OPERA folks are claiming a six-sigma deviation from the speed of light. This isn’t one of those annoying “three-sigma” results that sits at the tantalizing boundary of statistical significance. All that would instantly change, of course, if it were independently verified by another experiment at that point the gleeful jumping up and down will justifiably commence. It’s just a very difficult experiment, and given that the result is so completely contrary to our expectations, it’s much easier at this point to believe there is a hidden glitch than to take it at face value.
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