Caution and whimsy in New York Times speedy-neutrino update

Dennis Overbye’s “ Particles faster than the speed of light? Not so fast, some say ” — in the 25 October Science Times section of the New York Times — reports that many physicists continue to doubt the European experimental results indicating that neutrinos can exceed c.

He adds: “But that has not stopped the ghostly neutrinos, which can sail through miles of solid lead with impunity, from achieving a sort of pop culture fame not seen since 1960, when John Updike published a poem about them in The New Yorker.”

Overbye cites doubters’ fast-appearing technical articles, including “ New constraints on neutrino velocities ” from Andrew G. Cohen and Sheldon L. Glashow, the physics Nobel laureate. Their abstract says, “For the claimed superluminal neutrino velocity and at the stated mean neutrino energy, we find that most of the neutrinos would have suffered several pair emissions en route, causing the beam to be depleted of higher energy neutrinos. Thus we refute the superluminal interpretation of the OPERA result.”

At the end, Overbye quotes John Learned, a neutrino physicist at the University of Hawaii, who says that even if the neutrino results turn out wrong, “they are still not easily dismissed,” that it’s “very unlikely ... that any distant observer will point out the error of their ways,” and that any mistake “is probably in the details not accessible to outsiders.”

But Overbye has not filed a merely technical recitation of the present state of the speedy-neutrino news. He spices it with some neutrino whimsy.

He draws in the Irish band called the Corrigan Brothers, formerly Hardy Drew and the Nancy Boys. They’re known for a silly, cheerful tune derived from a traditional Irish air, “ There’s No One as Irish as Barack O’Bama .” Now Overbye has introduced to Science Times readers their similarly framed new song, “ Einstein and the Neutrinos .”

Overbye also quotes a few lines of the Updike poem. From an annotated version in the physics-focused Symmetry magazine, here’s a longer excerpt from the beginning of “ Cosmic Gall ":

Neutrinos, they are very small.

They have no charge and have no mass

And do not interact at all.

The earth is just a silly ball

To them, through which they simply pass,

Like dustmaids down a drafty hall

Or photons through a sheet of glass.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.