Yesterday evening, I gave a public lecture in Dublin on the Gran Sasso neutrino experiment, hosted by the Irish Skeptics Society. The event formed part of Maths Week Ireland, an initiative co-ordinated by CALMAST, the science outreach group at our college. We had a great audience turnout and I enjoyed the Q&A afterwards immensely. Below is the abstract and you can find the slides for the talk here.
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In September 2011, a group of scientists announced that they had detected subatomic particles travelling at speeds greater than the speed of light in vacuum. The finding is in conflict with Einstein’s theory of relativity and has been met with great skepticism by mathematicians and physicists around the world. This lecture will examine the grounds for that skepticism and consider the role of skepticism in general in science and mathematics
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The Gran Sasso experiment
I suspect I was invited to speak because of a letter I had published on the subject in The Irish Times (below). Although the Gran Sasso experiment has certainly raised awareness of physics, I think the way the media are portraying this experiment as an ‘Einstein wrong’ story is most unfortunate. It is far too soon to reach that conclusion and the overall effect is to make science seem very uncertain. It is more Public Misunderstanding of Science than PUS, in my view.
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Sir, – Margaret Moore (September 29th) asks what word will be used to describe a speed faster than the speed of light. The technical term is superluminal speed. However, much of the media coverage of recent experiments at Gran Sasso has been very misleading. Almost all professional physicists (including the experimenters) consider the Gran Sasso result a curious anomaly almost certainly due to some unknown error in measurement, for several reasons:
1. Light is carried by particles of zero mass and it follows that there are fundamental theoretical reasons for supposing that the speed of light in vacuum represents a natural speed limit for particles of non-zero mass.
2. Thousands of experiments have verified that the tiniest particles of matter can be accelerated up to speeds close to, but not equal to, this limiting speed.
3. The recent Gran Sasso experiment involves measurements of time and distance of unprecedented precision, yet it was not designed for this specific purpose; thus there are many potential sources of systematic error.
It’s true that science sometimes progresses by upsetting the status quo, but scientists are a sceptical lot and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence! –Yours, etc,
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Does it matter how the experiment has been portrayed in the media? I think it does. A few years from now, journalists will be say ‘ but didn’t you guys think in 2011 that Einstein was wrong’? In fact, there has already been one editorial in the Wall St Journal urging inaction on climate change, on the basis that science is never certain, given the neutrino result (see point 5 of this article ). Exactly the wrong conclusion to draw…
Update
I see my lecture got a short review in today’s Irish Times. It’s not a bad overview, considering the writer wasn’t at the lecture. The last sentence doesn’t make sense, however – I suspect she meant supernovae instead of black holes!
Udate II
Just caught BBC program on the experiment (Marcus du Sautoy). Superb, superb program. Nothing like the players themselves for conveying the concepts of science..