OPERA Confirms: Neutrinos Travel Faster Than Light

an error in distance measurement from source to detector is the source of the problem

That's narrower than what I'm offering. For example, the Science 20 article points out a possible error in the refraction index of the Gran Sasso light guide. Your side of the bet (if you still want to take it) could be rephrased as "In whichever explanation is found, they had the source-detector distance and all time offsets right (or knowingly lied about them)".

Also I reserve the right to renegotiate if the exchange rate goes weird before either of us hears the explanation.

I was thinking about this earlier today, having read/posted about the original findings and the first papers of "Here are all the ways that the original findings might be incorrect.", and then this announcement this morning.

For simplicity, let's assume someone's initial probabilities are:

There is a 1% chance they were correct.

There is an 11% chance they made a Type A error.

There is an 11% chance they made a Type B error.

There is an 11% chance they made a Type C error.

There is an 11% chance they made a Type D error.

There is an 11% chance they made a Type E error.

There is an 11% chance they made a Type F error.

There is an 11% chance they made a Type G error.

There is an 11% chance they made a Type H error.

There is an 11% chance they made a Type I error.

This paper establishes that there is essentially a negligible chance they made a Type A error. But there are still 8 ways they could be wrong. If I'm doing the calculations correctly, this means they now have about a 1.12% chance of being correct from the perspective of that someone, because these findings also mean it is more likely that they made a Type B-I error as well.

This is a gross simplification of the problem. There are other certainly other possibilities than "Correct" and "9 equally likely types of error." But I think this helped me put the size of the task of proving the neutrinos did go faster than light into a better perspective.

Really? I'm starting to think maybe they might be correct.

The reason for why I posted this is because I was interested in the reactions it would evoke. It seems that many people here think that any information whatsoever is valuable and that one should update on that evidence.

It is very interesting to see how many people here are very skeptical of those results, even though they are based on comparatively hard evidence and they were signed by 180 top-notch scientists. Many of the same people give higher estimates, while demanding none or little evidence, for something that sounds as simple as faster than light phenomena when formulated in natural language, namely recursive self-improvement.

1 month ago I said it's time to reconsider and was downvoted.

Testing it once again.

That too!

I'm aware that we've caculated 'c' both by directly measuring the speed of light (to high precision), as well as indirectly via various formulas from relativity (we've directly measured time dilation, for instance, which lets you estimate c), but are the indirect measurements really accurate to parts per million?

It is possible that a photon's energy/ mass is doing so. I believe this was discused in detail in the previous post.

Dark matter ? But as explained by Manfred above, we have estimates of "c the speed of light" and of "c the fundamental constant of GR/QM" that match and don't match with the OPERA team... so I'm just noticing I'm confused for now. And waiting for further tests (like Fermilab or Japanese team who said they'll try to reproduce it).

Maybe it would just make more sense to invest in tech stocks in general. While one is not getting much of a speed up on each roundtrip, multiple roundtrips, doing a little calculation on each trip, sounds like a major engineering task and not a fundamental task. And if that works, then we get the usual speedup - NP to P or whatever the precise complexity class conversion is, which sounds very economically valuable and whomever maintained the FTL computer would be able to extract much of the surplus.

What wrong with hoping for the structure of the universe to be one way rather than another? I do it all the time.

See the Litany of Tarski.

Oops. There goes the classic tachyon model.

1) if neutrinos can beat lightspeed, relativity could simply not apply to them, rather than applying in some weird twisted way.

2) Neutrinos are nearly perfectly exempt from photon interactions (the simplest diagram is to pop out a virtual W and electron).

3) This could be the reason for 1.

4) How, then, do other charged particles get all relativized? Well, photons get entangled with just about everything just by virtue of most things having electrical charge. That's what the renormalization theory is about - including all of the recursing interaction effects that a particle can't get rid of into its basic description.

So, if you have, say, innate Galileian relativity for most particles but not for light, which has a constant speed in a preferred rest frame, charged particles are going to act at least a little bit like relativity predicts - as the particle approaches light speed, the bow wave part of its E-field gets stronger and stronger, accumulating energy... as it approaches the speed of light the photon energy would diverge like on a jet about to go supersonic, except that unlike the jet, you simply can't get the photons out of the way fast enough.

Hmm. That really doesn't work, because it suggests that the mass dilation would vary proportional to charge, not to mass. So I withdraw the first notion too.