Rob Seaman wrote: >Or maybe a POSIX timestamp? With a 2.4 ms flight time, it seems unnecessary to track which second the events occur in. Leap seconds are a non-issue.
When I read about the neutrino result in the media, I was immediately struck by the diverse and subtle range of relativistic effects that one would have to account for in order to meaningfully make the measurement, quite apart from merely synchronising the clocks. Gravitational *space* dilation is a fairly obvious one, making the path taken by the neutrinos slightly shorter than one would expect from applying Euclidean geometry to geodetic measurements made above the Earth's surface. Looking at the OPERA paper, it's worrying to see that this issue, like many that the Contaldi paper listed, is not mentioned. In fact, the OPERA paper makes no mention at all of any relativistic corrections, even for matters as simple as the labs being at different altitudes. I saw a quote from one of the researchers along the lines of "we're clever enough to have ruled out this being a trivial error". But it's looking rather as though they ignored relativity entirely, which is a fairly basic error when measuring things near light speed. -zefram _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
