The bartender says, “We don’t serve neutrinos here”
A neutrino walks into a bar.
The blogosphere is all abuzz about the CERN neutrino experiment that reported “faster than light” travel for the neutrinos. We all heard the news first from the blogs, and now the arXive pre-print server has the details. This immediate publication is already truly amazing, given the months before the paper copy appears in the library journal. The comments and consequences are flying so thick and fast, one hardly has time to absorb the impact. Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity some 107 years ago, and this has been the first, contradictory laboratory evidence for “superluminal” transport.
But already, one day later, the first theorist has chimed in with an explanation. Not to miss any opportunities, the same theorist has a second explanation, with a different cast of secondary authors. Since both papers are written exclusively by Italians, it would appear that they had their theories ready to go as soon as the experimentalists were confident enough to publish. Other theorists weren’t so fortunate to get advance notice, but they are quick with their theories too. Frank Close, an Oxford physicist who just published a book on the Neutrino, doesn’t think his life’s work was wasted quite yet.