My brother Andy asked me what I thought of the news that the faster-than-light neutrino result had been confirmed. Like pretty much all physicists, I was very skeptical of the original result, and I’m still skeptical. Here’s what I told him:
This is a confirmation by the same group, using essentially the same technique. They’ve improved the setup in one way that should eliminate one possible source of error (specifically, they made the neutrino pulses narrower, which makes it easier to compare arrival and departure times). That is an improvement, but that wasn’t the only possible source of error, and in fact I never thought it was the most likely one. I’m still waiting for confirmation by an independent group.
