Claiming more? Show it! Faster than a speeding neutrino!

Marcello Truzzi, sociologist and founder or co-founder of a number of organizations investigating extraordinary claims, is said to have coined the phrase, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."  Carl Sagan popularized this phrase as "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."  And so it is with the recent claim that neutrinos can exceed the speed of light, the proverbial c in e=mc^2.

We posted about this remarkable claim when it first came out (here), and then when the same group claimed to have replicated their own results (here), and of course the story was all over the web.  As it should have been, because if true, it would have overturned one of the most robust theories in physics.  The finding was not only extraordinary, it was revolutionary.  (Ethan Siegel's blog, Starts With a Bang, has a bunch of very fine, accessible and detailed explanations of the whole story as it has unfolded.)

Flaws in the experiment are now being reported.  Here's the piece in Nature, but it's also everywhere -- like on the BBC.  Science Insider broke the news, and Siegel explains the possible alternative scenarios here.

The same group, OPERA, that made the original finding is now identifying their likely errors.  As the Nature piece explains it:

...according to a statement OPERA began circulating today, two possible problems have now been found with its set-up. As many physicists had speculated might be the case, both are related to the experiment’s pioneering use of Global Positioning System (GPS) signals to synchronize atomic clocks at each end of its neutrino beam. First, the passage of time on the clocks between the arrival of the synchronizing signal has to be interpolated and OPERA now says this may not have been done correctly. Second, there was a possible faulty connection between the GPS signal and the OPERA master clock.

The Science Insider story writes that if the group does the equivalent of rebooting their computer -- simpler, actually; just tightening the connection between the fiber optic cable that connects to their GPS receiver -- that one fix would add those missing 60 nanoseconds back to the neutrino travel time.

Oops.


Though, the BBC tells the story differently.  As they tell it, OPERA says there's another possible explanation, which has to do with "the oscillator used to produce the events time-stamps in between the GPS synchronizations.  These two issues can modify the neutrino time of flight in opposite directions."   The BBC says that tightening the connection would increase the apparent already ultra-fast speed, while fixing the oscillator would slow it down.  That is, either they are more right, or they know why they're wrong.

So, apparently, within the group there's still hope of a revolution.  They'll keep us posted.  And while they work on tightening up experimental conditions, a group at Fermilab in Illinois and a group in Japan are hoping to test this themselves.

While we leave this to the physicists to sort out, there are still some lessons to be learned for the rest of us. The speed of light is a given in physics -- it has been tested without serious challenge for a century, and any suggestion that it can be exceeded must be met with skepticism. There are simply too many direct experiments, and zillions more indirect ones, that seem consistent with the theory. Were he alive today, Marcello Truzzi would surely have written the neutrino results up in his journal, The Zetetic (The Skeptic).

We don't have the same kinds of laws in Biology, as a rule, but evolution and the nature of genes are aspects that seem to come about as close to fundamental theory as we currently can get. And there are important lessons to learn about life at large, compared with what we learn from the ultra-tiny neutrino.

Whether the speed of light is actually 100.000000000000% constant in every 'vacuum' and every part of the universe, apparently has to do with various theoretical issues or explanatory frameworks that are beyond what we know anything about. However, it is close enough and a robust enough finding that we can argue about whether a neutrino can violate this law at all. Any deviation, no matter how tiny, will grab major headlines and be good for the physics professor business!

We are not qualified to say whether a quadzillionth of a percent deviation from the proverbial c, will change much that is of even theoretical importance. Does every single last photon always stream along at exactly the same speed all the time? That kind of constancy would be basically unprecedented in the word of even science's everyday life. What if it simply showed that c is not an eternally totally fixed value but that photon-travelers, like neutrinos, sometimes hustle, sometimes dawdle a tiny tad?

Be that as it may, we have little if anything that is anywhere near so precise, exact, and universal about life or evolution. The proof of this is how easily--routinely, even--professors and their reporter-acolytes proclaim essentially revolutionary, major, dramatic, or transformative new findings.

A new fossil often is claimed to entirely overturn everything we said we knew about human evolution, or so the media and the discoverer will have you believe (as we have commented recently in MT). A fossil found sucking its thumb would be argued to completely revolutionize our understanding of the evolution of thumbs (and depending on its age at death, perhaps also about the length of childhood in our ancestors!).

In contemporary genetics, which is Gee!Wash in GWAS, first the idea that would revolutionize everything was that common variants cause common disease; then that to a great extent the same gene variants cause the same disease in all populations; then it was rare variants are the culprits to be discovered with wholegenome sequence; then epigenetics; then copy-number variation; then gene regulatory networks. The chain of 'omics' revolutions is, so far, endless. Medicine will be revolutionized by being genomically personalized.

We are truly learning a lot about life, but the major changes in views claimed for each new finding or paper shows clearly that we simply do not have our theoretical 'neutrinos'. Our knowledge is too easy to 'revolutionize' by the next technology that comes down the pike, to be considered theoretically very sound knowledge.

Now, physicists will be melodramatic about whatever is found in those little hyper-travelers, just as biologists are about how every new genetic variant they discover that will guarantee immortality. And, not least of the physicists' worries in all this is whether it will affect their funding. They have their sick side just as we do: that finding out truth will determine whether we can keep our jobs--even though our jobs are, supposedly, to find out truth!

The educated public, and scientists ourselves, need to realize and acknowledge how very far we are from physics-like understanding of life. And given that, and the topsy-turvy claim-laden recent history of genetics, medical genetics, and evolutionary biology, there should be some slowing down, taking stock, and tempering of our claims. When we are this far from absolute truths, and no really sound underlying theory, we have no business over-promising, much less being in such a frenzied (fund-seeking-based) race.

Perhaps it's time for some medicine for our ailment: some sanctions for claiming too much, and not acknowledging the depth of our own loose connections. Or some accountability for real progress in (say) curing disease, rather than the moving target of promises not met. This is because if we had some accountability or didn't rush for headlines and snow-jobs at every turn, we might temper our thoughts as well as our claims, and spend more time and effort understanding how multiple, variable, hard-to-measure causal elements worked together, and varied, in relation to biological traits normal and disease, and their evolution.

We face very challenging and legitimate issues in biology, both to understand evolution and to bring about major biomedical advances. We should be able to make much better progress if we knuckle down more intensely to understand the complexity of life's complexity, rather that slicing and dicing it up into this or that one-size, large-scale, comprehensively enumerative ('omic') style approach that essentially promises to turn complexity into simplicity. We know the professional pressures that push us in the latter direction, and we all feel them, and we inculcate new members of the guild into that environment. But nobody seems to be resisting these pressures.

Basically, like physicists, we should own up to our rather large array of loose connections. Until we do, there is something well-known that's Faster than a Speeding Neutrino. It is the speed with which biologists rush to call a press conference to announce their latest Discovery.

Light still cannot be shed on a speeding neutrino?

A while ago there was the report that neutrinos may be able to travel faster than the speed of light, an ultimate no-no in science.  That's worse than DUI or speeding on a highway. As we posted a while back, it violates not just some local ordinance, but a century-old prohibition that should hold true anywhere in the universe!

Now, the same lab has reported that they've replicated the experiment, again finding the neutrino to be committing its crime, flying faster than a pepperoni pizza disappears in a frat house.  Some say that a different lab will have to do this, because maybe the perps are not the neutrinos but the lab set-up.  This is serious business!

xkcd

The Laws of Nature simply do not allow anything to travel faster than the speed of light (even a cosmic cop car).  Indeed, going faster would be hard to document ordinarily because light must be used to track the damn thing flying by, and light can't catch something that goes even faster.  We don't know if neutrinos produce the equivalent of a sonic boom from an object exceeding the speed of sound.  Nor do we know what makes light (much less neutrinos) actually go anywhere. But apparently they (light photons, anyway) are so ever dissatisfied with where they are that they cannot stop zipping away, and for some strange reason, they only go in high gear.

There can be no violation of a Law of Nature
Of course, there can be no violation of a Law of Nature.  That's because a Law of Nature by definition is something that cannot be violated--anywhere, any time.  So if the neutrino is doing what is reported, it is not violating a Law of Nature.  Instead, we simply had been misreading the 'Law'.  We'll have to revise our theories of physics.  Of course, it is our notion that such laws exist, but it would be strange if there were no universal principles in the universe!

If we've misunderstood things, there will be some other factor, force, or basic principle that we will have to identify that explains what we now know.  Since so much has seemed consistent with the speed of light being constant and maximal, in global experiments around the world, the new factor may apply only under very unusual circumstances, or else why didn't we sense its existince?  It could also be that now we know to look carefully, we'll find that the implications are much broader than just such rarities, and will fill in or modify other things that were difficult to explain in the past, Einstein notwithstanding.

This experience can apply to any field.  Biology is the same. We may think we have principles analogous to 'laws', or at least that are fundamental to all of life.  But at present we find few principles that don't have exceptions.  Those who argue explicitly or in practice that, in essence, evolutionary biology and genetics have now revealed the basic principles of life (even if we have yet to learn scads of details), are perhaps making rather bold claims.

Beyond the current misbehavior of neutrinos, if the history of science teaches us anything it is that there will always be (or, at least, has always been) surprises around the corner: fundamental new discoveries that force major changes in what we thought we knew.

As we have said before, this reality makes it hard to interpret problematic results, such as the incompleteness of GWAS studies, or the difficulty in testing evolutionary adaptation stories.  The arguments about these things, including statements by us and those dropping comments here on MT, are all based on the value of some generally agreed-on parameter such as the strength of genetic causation, the amount of natural selection, or the probability of a disease for people with a given genotype.  

Even in our most vehement disagreements about such things, we don't argue that the explanatory elusiveness is due to some unknown, as yet undiscovered factor or principle.  This is very strange, given that all the evidence shows the near inevitability of some transformative discovery at some point in the future.  Why don't we invoke Factor X (biological 'dark matter') to make our point?

The obvious answer is that we would not be constrained in what kind of Factor X we might invent, and we could always be able to invent one that would perfectly satisfy our point of view in a dispute about the facts.  Science is supposed to be the quest to understand the true causal nature of Nature, staying within things that are material and testable.  So, while we know that Factor X's are likely to be discovered, we're generally not allowed to invoke them, even in principle, although some examples that come close to that do exist, such as fudge factors like Planck's constant in physics (or string theory in general?).

In biology, genes were invoked before anybody had the foggiest idea what they were, and some viewed them as made-up metaphysical notions.  But that notion was specific and led to experiments that, in fact, showed that they exist.   We're allowed to include factors such as statistical 'noise', that quantify deviations from our theory and the actual data, but they assume something like random irrelevancies such as measurement errors.  Statistical noise thus isn't a fudge factor invoked as being anything real, and in a way is an open-ended excuse for clinging to an explanation that doesn't quite fit the data.

The likelihood that fundamental factors or principles do exist but that, like some items of clothing, are unmentionable, puts us in a bind--like trying to track a speeding neutrino that is traveling faster than the light we have to use to track it.

This prohibition is at the core of science, and is necessary, but it's very weird!