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CERN Experiment Indicates Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos
intellitech writes "Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists — because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light. Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a few billionths of a second early. The results will soon be online to draw closer scrutiny to a result that, if true, would upend a century of physics. The lab's research director called it 'an apparently unbelievable result.'" Also on the AP wire, as carried by PhysOrg, which similarly emphasizes that the data are preliminary.
Update: 09/22 20:43 GMT by T : Reader Curunir_wolf adds a link to the experiment itself, the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus, or OPERA, which "was developed to study the phenomenon of neutrino transmutation (neutrinos changing from one type to another. The speed of the neutrinos, of course, was an entirely unexpected observation."
The Particle then go back in Time!
EOM
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Actually it's the second... the first appeared before the article was posted.
Looks like someone forgot to zero the clocks...
Would these be tachyons then?
Do they mean the neutrinos are breaking c (the speed of light in a vacuum) or the local speed of light? Even the latter would be extremely interesting.
The ultimate test, of course, is to watch for many physicists start winning the lottery.
How do you synchronize clocks to be this accurate in the first place?
I hope those results are correct. It would be very amusing.
I was expecting something huge, not some tiny measurement that is almost certainly a measurement error.
I searched for 'faster than light' on the CERN website, got articles posted in 2012, 2014. They put this new discovery to work right away!
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
here we come. watch out universe. the human plague is soon to descend on you!
This was a rational piece without too many sensationalist remarks! How do we show them we appreciate decent scientific writing as opposed to the crap we normally get?
Massless faster than light particles have been theorized for decades but what's shocking is this comes on the heels of Neutrinos being found to have mass. If true it could throw a monkey wrench into a number of models.
But it's still cool that having your clock/detector be 60 nanoseconds off is the different between rewriting physics textbooks and ho-hum.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/09/italian-out-of-tune-superluminal.html
"...the neutrinos are claimed to have arrived 60 nanoseconds before the light. Because this is claimed to be a 6-sigma signal, their total error margin of the timing should be 10 nanoseconds (3 meters over c); recall that the distance is 732 km. I leave it to the reader to decide whether this accuracy is plausible given the messy birth and detection of the particles. One nanosecond is the duration of one cycle of your iPhone microprocessor, among other things. Ten nanoseconds is 40% of the lifetime of the charged pion or 80% of the lifetime of the charged kaon. I can kind of imagine that they're doing something really silly, like imagining that each pion or kaon lives at least for the lifetime and then it dies. But some of them decay immediately; this error could erase most of the 60-nanosecond discrepancy."
Somebody probably just left a slightly magnetized keychain next to something.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
They should just make c in E = mc^2 the speed of the nutrino.
Very interesting thought. Photons interact with matter all the time and have been shown to slow down when passing through certain media. Neutrinos rarely interact with anything, so of all the known particles, they are a candidate to travel at the maximum speed allowable.
Someone explain how such a minute measurement can be consistently recorded?
...creates reality. I like it.
There was a young lady named bright : who could travel much faster than light : She went out one day : in a relative way: and came back the previous night.
Eh, this happens every few years... what tends to be the case is someone gets a hold of one of the charts where velocities were recorded and due to measurement issues there is a probability curve rather then a simple line... normally you use the curve to determine what the actual velocity was, but you always get at least a couple yahoos that look at the curve, notice that one of the tails goes above C and get all excited that something is going faster then light.
This brings back hope for the warp travel! Who wants to live in a jump gate universe full of crime and corruption? I'm glad I did not sell my stock in that delithium crystal mine!
I know they have tried to factor out obvious stuff, but wouldnt the rotation around the sun ( or galaxy) mean that its possible they're hitting a target that's moving "closer" to the source?
Divide by zero...
http://i270.photobucket.com/albums/jj105/callatov/Divided_by_zero.jpg
And why would this result be impossible? Many have posted that the instruments were flawed or the scientists made a mistake, but not too long ago scientists were 100% certain that the world was flat too. Just because scientists currently believe that nothing can go faster than the speed of light doesn't make it so. Our views of the universe are always changing and saying that a result is "impossible", no matter how unlikely the result, is a bit short sided.
Was it faster than the speed of light in the given medium or faster than the speed of light in vacuum?
60 ns / 2 ms is 3 x 10^-5. The speed of light has been verified to much better than that with photons (that would be a 7 orders of magnitude error on Mars ranging, for example, and about the same on LLR), so, if true, this is a neutrino issue.
My money would be on systematic error.
Neutrinos have been observed coming from supernovae from light years away. There would have been a very noticeable time difference between the neutrinos and the light at that distance if this were true. (Any astrophysicists about to verify this?)
I'm skeptical. I think it was likely a wiring problem. It only takes a few centimeters of wire to make a 60ns delay, and these experiments are notorious for using many wires.
60ns is a very very long time :D, I did measurements in the scale of 20ps with "home-brew" equipment... and even measuring particle physics at close range needs 2-5ns precision. So 60ns is not a small error, but actually a very big one. But I can't seems to find the reference for 60ns, "few billionths of a second" can mean 1-5ns too.
In Star Trek, any time you wanted to detect evidence of time travel, you searched for neutrinos. Travelling faster than the speed of light would imply moving backwards through time. Was Roddenberry's techno-babble a prediction of future discoveries?
Take a look at this useful primer about faster than light travel and what it would mean for modern physics. It sure would be interesting. No, amazing!
Makes you wonder:
1) If true and behaves consistently (whatever THAT means) in this "universe"
2) did we just yell, "We are here! We are HERE!"
In the context of depending on an arbitrary and possibly wrong "speed limit," in this case, the speed of light in a vacuum. Therefore we may find it to be true that any mass can go faster than the speed of light at any speed and causality will be unchanged as it won't depend on any type of speed limit.
http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/gravity/overview.php
Since I didn't see their data, I can only guess what could be the problem. They're detecting both neutrinos and light some way. My bet is that their detector for light have some additional delay making the light detection wrong. They probably didn't spend millions on the light detection system since they were planning to detect neutrinos only. Probably cheap parts are causing this problem.
The numbers in the Reuter's article show the speed of light for neutrinos is 1 part in 40,000 times faster than the speed of light for normal matter.
I don't think this involves causality violations just yet. All our speed of light experiments to date involve measuring particles involving the electromagnetic force (protons, electrons, photons). Even if confirmed, it could be that there's some measurement error in the EM-derived speed of light, which the neutrino is immune to. In which case, it's not useful for time travel. It simply means our measurement of c was off by a smidge.
And given the small size of the result, if FTL neutrino communication is proved true, I expect the only real-world application would be financial companies trying to squeeze a few more nanoseconds off NYC-London communications.
wonder if anyone's going to file a patent for a "Tachyonic antitelephone" after hearing this news...
I feel like some of the claims we're hearing these days in the theoretical science community are publicity moves. If they're disproved, so what? They get free advertising; the loss of credibility seems to be negligible. On the other hand if they're are right, they are first to publish and get the attention. I, for one, will be watching for the news in the next couple of weeks/months that says the independent verification failed and they found an error in their data.
Yea but they did the test 15,000 times to confirm it before even mentioning it to the public.
Well, it was 60 billionths. It was "a few" in much the same sense that a teenager invites "a few" friends over when his parents are out of town.
The detector is 732km away for the emitter and light travels at 299 792 458 m/s. In one billionth of a second, light only travels 29.9 cm. If they are off in the precision of measuring a 732km distance by even as little as 30 cm (~1ft), then their timings will be off by 1 billionth of a second.
First Billion 1,000,000,000 or 1,000,000,000,000 ? Second How accurate did they measure the distance?
They sent one kind of particle and another kind arrived, according to TFA. They sent a Ford Pinto and a Testarossa arrived. Of course it arrived sooner than expected. Duh.
Article says they eliminated possible sources for error but doesn't list them. Every scientific paper I've ever wrote had a section you had to list possible venues for errors in your experiment. I don't doubt they did, but I'd like to know what they were. I can't even get all my clocks in my apt to sync up to my computer or at work or to the tv or anything else. I imagine it's really hard to do this with two remote locations unless the clocks were perfectly synced in person and then transported to the different research stations. Otherwise, if they eliminated all possible known error sources could this have been a spacetime bend? We already know that matter/gravity bends spacetime. Perhaps there was a varying gravity density between the two stations? I know neutrinos rarely interact with matter but are they affected by gravity like photons are?
John Titor predicted CERN would cause the breakthrough...
At one point during college i was given the opportunity to visit a nuclear plant monitor station.
I do remember seeing output readings of 100.4 %
This is going to boil down to some sort of inaccurate sensor, since we can't reach the speed of light, how did we ever really measure it.
It was all calculated.
In the meantime, the group says it is being very cautious about its claims.
"We tried to find all possible explanations for this," said report author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration.
"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," he told BBC News.
"When you don't find anything, then you say 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.'"
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484
That would throw off calculations regarding the conversion of mass to energy.
I have always wondered how in the hell is the ratio of mass to energy exactly the speed of light squared? I don't quite see why they should be related, but the fact that they are should say something.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Gravity follows inverse square law with distance if you were down far enough underground wouldn't the deformation of the metric be somewhat different due to significant masses below AND above you?
If you compared the underground effect with above ground laser results the true time/path length thru metric is slightly different.
The physics of the past century do not empower us to send humans to other habitable planets. So...they need a good upending.
They have mass, that automatically means that their maximum theoretical speed (according to relativity) is some number lower than c. c is the speed of light in an impossibly hard vacuum where there is no matter to interact with. That's why this result is so surprising, it is in direct contradiction to the central idea of relativity, that no massless particle can travel at or above c.
Interesting times ahead.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
My gut feeling is that they set a more precise value to the speed of light. What better than a particle that interacts almost not at all with matter, to measure it?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
"or Else" what?
*Gulp*
It's going to be great when they go through all the work of replicating this only to realize that some janitor moved the detector to the other side of the room so he could sweep behind it and no one noticed it.
Yes, I know neutron detectors aren't something you just scoot out of the way, it's a joke! At the same time, their distance measurement only needs to be off by 6 meters to produce the observed error. I can't imagine that wasn't on their list of things to check though.
... I want my warp drive.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
That scale factor has been tested to much better than 5 orders of magnitude.
I feel that maybe the speed limit wasn't broken, just wrong. Maybe light can't go “light speed”? but neutrinos can?
If you have faster than light travel, you can have causality violations. (In other words, you could prevent your own birth, change history, things like that.) True, it might require sending neutrino detectors off at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, but what is that compared to messing around with the course of history, not to mention the stock market and the pool on the Super Bowl ?
MINOS was essentially the same experiment. Why didn't they detect this? Or were they even looking at neutrino speeds?
Did they measure travel time by pulsing neutrino generation and looking at the time difference between pulse start and detection?
It just seems like a crazy result, and I can't believe that they would have overlooked something as simple as a measurement or rounding error, but I literally cannot make sense of this.
Now I can play lagless counter-strike with my mates in Japan who use fiber.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor#Predictive_Failures.
Or it was a computer that used a (int) cast on the result.
That would be impossible. When they mosey up to an atom they probability shift onto the other side of the atom, skipping the intervening distance instead of hitting it.
It's a quantum thing, you wouldn't understand.
The official announcement will be only tomorrow:
http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=155620 ...and yet the news wires are already there.
could curvature due to the earth's gravity well cause the discrepancy ?
seems to large for that to be it, but it's possible.
No matter how much we think we understand the 'laws' of existence, in actual fact, we really understand very little. The only thing we 'know', with any amount of certainty, is that we don't know -anything- - not a damn thing. It's a good guess at best - and boy, does science like its theories. Chances are, we will never will discover 'the truth' as we're much more likely to destroy ourselves before that ever happens.
;-)
The 'truth' is that there is no 'truth', unless, of course, there is a 'truth'. But, ultimately, what does it matter anyway? Everything will always be everything - until it's nothing - or is that not possible? A state of constant transformation or maybe -not-. A fractal flux perhaps?
Put that in your pipe and smoke it (or not)! It really doesn't matter - we're all batshit crazy (or are we?).
but they are closing in the next few months.
high-frequency trading of course
fifteen jugglers, five believers
and orders a beer.
A neutrino walks into a bar.
'when you take away the impossible what you are left with, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.'
Einstein may have been mistaken, it could be that the speed of light, like the speed of sound so many decades previously, can in fact be broken, and all the effects that Einstein theorised are in fact just causalities to do with what in fact would be 'seen' by an observer, as opposed to what would actually be happening in 'real time' as it were... as the object would be moving faster than the light it would be producing, it would be unable to be observed in any 'normal time' frame and would appear to observers to slow down and stop, and even move backward in time as it broke its own 'light barrier'. This is only a hypothesis of course, based on my rather small understanding of the effects...
M
-Magdalene --"there are 10 types of people in the world, those who read binary, and those who don't"
What if the maximum speed in the universe was the speed of the Neutrino (N), and that photons just happened to travel at 99.9999% of N? Perhaps general relativity is correct, and the Lorentz equations work, but instead of Sqrt( (1 + V/C) / (1 - V/C) ) it is Sqrt( (1 + V/N) / (1 - V/N) ). If C and N are sufficiently close, it would explain why we haven't noticed the difference before. This would mean that casuality wouldn't need to be abandoned; space/time diagrams would just be based on the speed of the Neutron instead of Light.
By the way, I know everybody at CERN is both smarter and more knowledgeable than I. I'm just having fun.
Considering differences in altitude, oblateness of the Earth, the detector is underground, and so on, it isn't hard to imagine an 18m position error over approximately 732,000 m distance measured or calculated.
Considering that the world's longest tunnel is 57 km long and they drilled it from both ends and the error when both ends met in the middle was about a half meter, one gets an idea of what's the attainable precision.
If they used the same level of precision, scaling up the error would result in a 6 m error at 732 km. However one must take into account that in digging the railroad tunnel they only went to the precision level they needed for that job, one must assume that the scientists used more precise methods.
So, it's very hard, practically impossible, to imagine that there would exist an error of 18 m in the position of the detector.
732 000 m (approximate distance ?) /s ( c )
/
299 792 458 m
=
0.00244168917 s ( 2 441 689.17 ns travel time )
2 441 689.17 ns
-
60ns ( discrepency )
=
2 441 629.17 ns or (0.00244162917 s, adjusted travel time)
299 792 458 ( c )
x
0.00244162917 ( adjusted travel time )
=
731 982.01 m (adjusted distance )
So the distance is 18m, or 59ft, shorter than the implemented design? Spread over 731 982 m, that's a .02459 mm (24.59 um ) per meter discrepency. Do weld discrepencies between sections come into play here? I think so.
Using c as your reference point, and maintaining it is constant at all conditions, with these numbers It is entirely possible and the adjusted distance is correct. They didn't use light as their tool of measurement when builtding CERN. Or did they?
While both source and destination are not moving relative to each other they are accelerating in slightly different directions due to the spin of the earth and that they are at different longitude.
Depending on whether the emitter is east or west of the detector this will make a up some of the difference.
Break out the Kosinski scale!
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
Faggotry on Slashdot. Not only is it faster than the speed of light, it is more massive than a black hole, and more ubiquitous that neutrinos.
Yes /. You are the tops in online faggotry. As a matter of fact, you are the faggotiest thing in the entire multiverse.
Fuck you, and fuck /..
Gentlement, I present to you, the TACHYON.
Worth reading:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/22/faster-than-light-travel-discovered-slow-down-folks/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BadAstronomyBlog+%28Bad+Astronomy%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
I'm guessing they used a laser to calibrate the experiment; if that's the case then the actual distance is nearly irrelevant.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate. ~Henry J. Tillman
When can I get my FTL drive?
This is ridiculously stupid and simple to ask, but I'll fire away anyway...
Never stopped me before, why now?
Did they or do they have some way of sending a 'normal' light signal, like say a powerful radio wave, across the same distance and measuring the travel time? If they see it's 60ns longer than the neutrinos then I think we're getting somewhere, neh?
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
And since REM just announced that they are disbanding, I can't help how prescient one of their signature songs is: "It's the end of the world as we know it...."
I've heard that during L'Aquila earthquake the terrain moved some meters...maybe those events are related.
Since neutrinos have a mass, they are affected by gravity, this would make the path they travel from source to detector, curved and thus slightly longer and a massive particle will be slightly accelerated by gravity. But accelerated faster then the speed of light?
The OPERA result isn't available yet, but the older MINOS result (I'm the corresponding author of the paper) IS available:
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9712265
Location of the detectors is in fact dead accurate, to better than a meter with modern survey equipment, even when the detector is deep underground. The bigger errors are the delays in signals and electronics. For us, the major uncertainty was the delay it took to push the clock signal down a fibre-optic cable from the surface to the Far Detector: a delay of about 1 microsecond, with an uncertainty of about 50 ns. OPERA may very well have done a better job than we did, but it's actually this sort of thing that is hard.
Parent of the parent had the basic idea right though: the sigma is estimated based upon a systematic uncertainty. If a mistake were made in either a distance, a delay, or the uncertainty on either, it could yield a result like this. I remain cautiously skeptical about it.
We'll see after the paper is available tomorrow.
I love how every AGW story is filled with comments like "you're not a climatologist, so you're not qualified to question the results", but this story is filled comments from armchair physicists telling the people at CERN why they're wrong.
So, Einstein was wrong. Big deal. I've been telling people that for years. The rules in the third dimension don't necessarily apply to that which exists in the fourth. Of course, there is the remote chance those particular neutrinos are from the same experiment 10,000 years from now... Where, exactly were those neutrinos made? Did they lose any information?
There is nothing to FEAR but NOTHING itself; and I fear there is a whole lot of nothing going on. --scorpivs
Of course the neutrinos get there faster.
Photons struggling through empty space have to contend with virtual particles bouncing around and stuff.
c has been measured very very accurately by independent teams...it's not likely to be the source of the error.
Are neutrinos susceptible to the weak force?
Would subtracting the effect of gravity onto photons account for the difference?
Indeed. Using rtklib you can get 10 cm accuracy even with two cheap openmoko phones (~200 EUR) and cheap antennas (~20 EUR): http://lindi.iki.fi/lindi/finhack/finhack2010-rtklib-lindfors.pdf -- you can read more about it on foss-gps mailing list.
Here is a prediction : Some theorist will come up with a theory (probably involving neutrino oscillations) explaining why v > c is only observed at short range, and the effect vanishes and v->c over distances like 160,000 light years. For bonus points, the short range of the effect will make it impossible to use it for causality violations.
According to relativity It's only impossible to go faster than the speed of light through space-time. Mass and space-time are fundamentally linked. What we consider gravity is space-time which has been warped by an object with mass (e.g. the earth). If an object were to have truly no mass it wouldn't be bound by the same speed limits as normal matter. Considering the Standard Model of physics assumes the neutrino has no mass, and considering how much we've yet to learn about the physics governing sub-atomic particles, it's not impossible that we're seeing something new which doesn't necessarily have to violate Einstein's laws.
How does a neutrino even travel at the speed of light (considering it has a small rest mass)? Anyone?
Maybe they measured the distance between two points using kM instead of KiM which leaves them off by about 24 meters per kM...
Just when you make it idiotproof, some idiot builds a better idiot.
From analyzing gamma, wouldn't a speed greater than light imply the neutrino has either imaginary mass or imaginary energy?
If only physicists were used to using a language that often did implicit casts...
They are trying to invent some kind of new language. I say that if it's Nato and Cern, then it must also be Bbc, not BBC.
Doesn't anyone know what this means?! We've found the cure for all of life's problems! Just send a Tachyon beam at it and bounce it off the deflector dish! Thank you Star Trek for solving all of life's problems for us! Now bring out the green women!.
Disclaimer: Liberal Arts graduate. Knowledge of modern physics limited to reading snarky comments of slashdotters nitpicking sci-fi that fails to account for relativistic effects.
Could anybody find the original link from CERN or OPERA?
http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897v1
ELECTRONS have been observed going faster than light for almost 20 years!
(Quick Google you can do your own too) http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/07/19/tech/main216905.shtml.
This is part of what made physisits discount much of Einsteins work, they moved on to Hawkings and Feynman.
The big news is that they discovered a particle that makes it impossible that the Higg's Boson exists... so we're still totally clueless.
from TFA at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897v1 regarding the time and distance measurements:
time: "A key feature of the neutrino velocity measurement is the accuracy of the relative time tagging at CERN and at the OPERA detector. The standard GPS receivers formerly installed at CERN and LNGS would feature an insufficient ~100 ns accuracy for the TOF measurement. Thus, in 2008, two identical systems, composed of a GPS receiver for time-transfer applications Septentrio PolaRx2e [16] operating in “common-view” mode [17] and a Cs atomic clock Symmetricom Cs4000 [18], were installed at CERN and LNGS (see Figs. 3, 5 and 6)."
and "The difference between the time base of the CERN and OPERA PolaRx2e receivers was measured to be (2.3 ± 0.9) ns [22]. This correction was taken into account in the application of the time link."
So time measurements at the emission and detection sites seem to be correlated to within a few nanoseconds, at most.
distance: "The other fundamental ingredient for the neutrino velocity measurement is the knowledge of the distance between the point where the proton time-structure is measured at CERN and the origin of the underground OPERA detector reference frame at LNGS. The relative positions of the elements of the CNGS beam line are known with millimetre accuracy. When these coordinates are transformed into the global geodesy reference frame ETRF2000 [24] by relating them to external GPS benchmarks, they are known within 2 cm accuracy."
Distance measurements between the emitter and detector appear to be known to within an uncertainty that would be sub-nanosecond at c.
TFA gives the clear impression that a lot of skull sweat has gone into "checking the measurements", and there's a residual anomaly. Props to these folks for putting their work out where the world can see and criticize.
In 1987 there was supernova (SN1987A) in the large magellanic cloud which produced a burst of neutrinos in time with the light becoming visible (at least to within some hours accuracy) as seen in several detectors on earth.
A (very!) rough back of the envelope calculation would suggest that if the claimed effect is true of all neutrinos this neutrino burst would have been ~years earlier although the energy of the neutrinos is lower for an SN than an accelerator. So I'll need some convincing as to why these neutrinos did very clearly NOT travel faster-than-light. Since neutrinos barely notice ordinary matter it can hardly be a tunneling effect (which can make particles go FTL but not information) and the only other differences are that OPERA has muon, not electron neutrinos (at source) of a higher energy.
Details: CERN to Gran Sasso is O(10^5 m) and gives an O(10^-8s) time gain so the LMC is O(10^21m) away so, if the speed is the same, I'd expect an O(10^8s) time gain which is several years whereas they were observed in time enough to make the measurement one of the most stringent limits on neutrino mass at the time!
Faster than C I guess
If we detected a neutrino pulse would we have a good enough estimate of direction to look for the light? Or even the notion that we *should* look for a pulse of light several years later in the same region of sky? If we did record both by happenstance, would anyone have correlated the two events? That is weird enough that I'm thinking they wouldn't.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
http://msevior.livejournal.com/30816.html
More likely that the "micro"-gravity of earth is effecting the clock - watch as we accelerate thru the galaxy....
SETI has been wondering why we don't hear from any other life forms that exist out there, but if there exists some means to send information faster than the speed of light, why would any aliens limit themselves to the EM spectrum? If this proves to be accurate and available as a means to send information FTL, then we may have been looking in the wrong place all this time.
A part of me hopes to throw out all of my physics books, just on the off chance that the universe may not be as quiet as it looks
Zefram Cochrane developes the first warp drive.
I"m the last person who should bring this up as
everything I know about it is below.
At one time "stuff" could travel FTL.
The great expansion of the universe just after the big bang
wasn't possible without "stuff" traveling FTL.
I mentioned this and was told that the "stuff" could travel FTL
as it had no information.
I shook my head knowingly and left it at that.
----
So this "stuff" traveled (expanded) then obtained information, I see a similarity
with the neutrino changing into something else.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame-dragging
done in 1 bitches!
I'll bet that the gravity of the planet is what's at play here. If anything the speed of light will be constant but this will change something in calculations regarding gravitational distortion.
Perhaps the nutrinos are like an immenent future, similar to light but at a lower quanta level, and binding every instant to the next in a weak force kind of way
This isn't the first time some neutrino experiments indicated an imaginary mass.
A 1993 article
But other experiments indicated an ordinary (yet tiny) neutrino mass.
Another article
A third article
The neutrinos were moving faster than the measured speed of light in vacuum. This is very interesting. We assume that the speed of light in vacuum equals the maximum speed for the transmission of information. That is not _necessarily_ true since vacuum contains quantum fluctuations, dark energy and other quantum effects. In this case "c" would only be an approximation for the maximum speed for the transmission of information. Proposed Explanation: the speed of light in vacuum (c) and the observed neutrino speed are both less than the maximum speed for the transmission of information ( c++ ?).
How does one accomplish nanosecond resolution timing between two systems over such distances?
The neutrinobeam penetrates 760km of rock. You will need a bright light to shine photons through that to see what the speed of light in granite is.
All particles with positive mass go slower than the speed of light.
Particles with zero mass go at the speed of light.
Therefore these neutrinos, going faster than c, have negative mass.
Negative mass, plugged into gravitational formula will give repulsion rather than attraction.
If the universe is filled with these neutrinos, it would explain the repulsive force we label as dark energy.
Would someone explain what is wrong with this reasoning?
We all can travel faster than light in our dreams.
On the page you find the preprint (arxiv.org) you can also fins news articles and blogs mentioning the preprint:
http://arxiv.org/tb/recent
Could be good to browse through if you want to know more.
There has been a long debate about the anisotropy of the speed of light. The current orthodox belief is that it is isotropic, but I have yet to see a convincing proof. What would the CERN neutrino experiment tell with another detector elsewhere?
Maybe their computers are er.. bit out of date? You know, that old like first Pentium chips? :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_Bug and this is the explanation of this 60ns error.
The faster you travel, the slower the Time compared to observers..
Shouldnt the Neutrino also travel backwards in Time? Meaning it travelled even faster, but
arrived early since it's going backwards in Time a bit.
I read here and there that if this research is valid this could make time travel possible.
Is that just hyping?
If not, could anyone explain how this would work in understandable language to those of us without a physics degree, but very interested on an amateur level.
I know that the closer you get to lightspeed the slower time goes and a particle like a photon that travels at the speed of light has no mass and for that photon time stands still.
john titor is right , so waht next?
In looking for possible explanations, isn't it possible that this could be a nice twist towards String Theory? If we assume extra dimensions curled up inside the 3 spatial dimensions of our own + time, isn't it then possible for a neutrino to pass trough a curled up dimension and 'tunnel' it's way to the end point e.g. kind of wormhole?
Also, what was the mass of the neutrino when it went past light speed? Should have been infinitely big.
Speed limits are there for everyone's safety, and should not be ignored, this can lead to dangerous accidents
> Gran Sasso laboratory
I see, I see. A small commando of german neutrinos arrived through the air unexpectedly early at the Grans Sasso and liberated the Duce. Maybe if the researchers told those neutrinos to use the cable car instead of an airplane, the results would be equal to the expected value and do not up-end the jewish science of relativity.
You can download the actual paper by the OPERA collaboration here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 They have measured the distance of 730km to an uncertainty of 20cm using GPS and a dedicated geodesy campaign. Of course, when they talk about their six sigma result, this uncertainty is already included. If this turns out the be a fluke, it will most certainly not be because they messed up their distance or time measurements in a trivial way.
Perhaps the speed of light is the upper limit but some effects are seemingly outside its jurisdiction?
Quantum physics gives me a serious boner.
If this is true, a lot will change. But, with all the measuring, I'm sure they'll find the error.
this is the duplicate post, the original will follow shortly
I sat down to write a new sig tonight and all I did was make the chair warm.
as far as i know, when a matter is reaching the speed of light, it's energy jumps high till an infinite weight by the speed of light.
wouldn't this just simply destroy all their catching devices and creates a huge black hole?
sounds quite normal indeed: neutrinos use C++ :):)
Stupid question - but did they account for the curvature of the earth?
The GPS, and Radio signals would give a surface distance between the two points
but presumably the neutrinos went as the crow flies - through the crust, 732 km is well over the horizon.
We can turn the question upside down. Why can't be light in vacuum faster than 299 792 458 m/s?
"The superluminous speed obtained with a laser (acting upon rubies in series previously charged) has demolished the Einsteinian myth of the maximum speed (300.000 Km/sec) reaching up to 2,700.000Km/sec, that is, exceeding the "limit" nine times. These experiences were accomplished in 1967 in the laboratory of quantum radiophysics, the Lebedev Institute of Physics of the Academy of Science of the USSR by N. Basov (Lenin and Nobel Prizes), I. Zubarev, V. Efinkov and A. Grasik. This 'jump in octave' of the speed of l. will surely revolutionise the concepts of today's Physics." http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1964/basov-bio.html
Could it be that miniature black holes have formed somewhere along the path of the beam? those miniature black holes may have deformed the space in the path of the beam in such a way that the neutrinos arrived earlier, because they actually traveled a shorter distance.
Here is something that struck me - in that whole, huge, author list I did not see a single geodesist or clock comparison person. (I can't claim to know them all, but I did work in those fields and do know most of the major players, plus their institutions.) If it were me, I would have brought in an expert in both GPS geodesy (there is a strong group in Switzerland, and another in France, not to mention Italy) and clock comparisons (several strong groups in France) as co-authors before I published the paper.
Neither geodesy nor clock synchronization are trivial at the accuracy they are claiming over the distances they used - true, fairly routine now-a-days, but not trivial. Since the whole paper hangs on that, a few practiced eyes from those fields could not have hurt.
From the Ars technica article:
The final reason to be skeptical is the fact that this effect hasn't shown up in previous measurements. Thomas noted that it might be a matter of energy. Neutrinos from supernovae are relatively low energy; MINOS' were much higher, at which point a weak effect turned up. The OPERA studies are at higher energy still. So the results don't appear to be exactly comparable.
I think that the best proof of this would be to perform time of flight measurements around a triangle. This is commonly used in interferometry, as many errors (such as geodetic errors and clock errors) will "close" around a triangle, but the actual time of flight should not.
This is called the Sagnac effect, and is due to special relativity and the motion of the observers during the observations (it used to be called "retarded baseline" in VLBI). Now, an equilateral triangle with 700 km sides would only have a non-closing delay of 0.7 nanoseconds, which is too small, but one with 4500 km sides (roughly the US to Europe to Japan) would have a non-closing delay of 29 nanoseconds, which they could detect.
Colonel Sandurz: Try here. Stop.
Dark Helmet: What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen in the movie?
Colonel Sandurz: Now. You're looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now.
Dark Helmet: What happened to then?
Colonel Sandurz: We passed then.
Dark Helmet: When?
Colonel Sandurz: Just now. We're at now now.
Dark Helmet: Go back to then.
Colonel Sandurz: When?
Dark Helmet: Now.
Colonel Sandurz: Now?
Dark Helmet: Now.
Colonel Sandurz: I can't.
Dark Helmet: Why?
Colonel Sandurz: We missed it.
Dark Helmet: When?
Colonel Sandurz: Just now.
Dark Helmet: When will then be now?
Colonel Sandurz: Soon.
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094012/quotes]
- Sig
I am intimately familiar with the interaction of light with matter as a result of having been an avid Amateur Telescope Maker and Amateur Astronomer since the tender age of twelve.
This led to my acceptance to study Astronomy at Caltech in the Fall of 1982, where I was privileged to attend a non-credit class called "Physics X" that was taught by The Immortal Richard Feynman. You could ask him any question you wanted - it didn't have to be about Physics even - but the ensuing discussion had to be purely conceptual. Questions that would require Feynmen to work out equations on the chalkboard were not permitted.
One afternoon I pointed out to him that the phenomenon that light slows down as it passes through a medium just had to be wrong. When one examines any medium at a subatomic scale, it is mostly empty vacuum with some rare particles that have all been either proven or are suspected to be geometric points. (While Protons and Neutrons have a non-zero diameter, they are each composed of three quarks, which themselves are thought to be point particles.)
"Surely," I pointed out to Feynman, "When light passes through all this vacuous space inside a piece of glass, it always travels at precisely C! How could Snell's Law" - which yields the angle of refraction when light passes through the surface of a medium - "possibly be correct!"
I knew damn well that Snell's Law was correct, as Snell himself experimentally demonstrated the law hundreds of years ago. While he did not measure what the Speed of Light had to do with refraction, we have been able to measure light's speed for over a century.
Feynman replied that when light passes through matter, the charged particles in that matter oscillate in sympathy with the oscillations of the light's electomagnetic field. But because they are all in a bound state, and because accellerating charged particles causes them to emit light of their own, thereby carrying away energy and so dampening their sympathetic oscillation, the movements of the charged particles in matter is not quite in phase with the waves in the light passing through the medium.
Feynman concluded, "The light emitted by the charge particles in matter interferes with the light passing through the medium" - that is, wave peaks add to wave peaks, and so with troughs, while peaks and troughs together cancel each other - "so that the resulting combination of light waves only appears to move slower than C."
Thus the Photons are always moving at a constant velocity of C, but all the Photons in the medium interact so that passing a Photon through the medium will result in the exit Photon being delayed from the timing you would expect from when the entrance Photon entered the front surface. They key to understanding all this is that the entrance and exit Photons are NOT THE SAME PHOTON!
Feynman discusses this in a really lucid way, with rigorous mathematics, in Volume II of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Volume II covers Electricity and Magnetism, Volume I covers Classical Mechanics - Newton's Laws of Motion and such - while the third volume does Quantum Mechanics. The set of three is expensive but are easy to read, even if you don't know much Calculus, and would be a good investment for any Slashdotter.
I was mortally embarrased to realize years later that I had asked Feynman a really basic, purely conceptual question whose completely rigorous answer led to him sharing the 1965 Nobel Prize with Tomanaga of Japan! Their Quantum Electrodynamics describes the interaction of light with electric charge with complete precision.
Feynman's formulation uses a conceptual drawing called a Feynman Diagram as a calculational and explanatory device. I don't know how Tomanaga formulated his Quantum Electrodynamics, but my understanding as that at first no one could understand why the two theories seemed quite different but always yielded the same numerical results. Some time later Freeman Dyson - Esth
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Is it a stupid question to ask whether Speed of light 'c' itself could be changing? (maybe as a function of the expansion of the universe?)
I mean is it really established beyond doubt, that there is no way for Speed of Light to be able to change? or is it just an assumption?
I know that it would be relatively easy to check whether such a behavior of 'c' is responsible for the strange results of this experiment. They simply have to do a control experiment to re-measure speed of light with the same accuracy, and preferably over the same distance and locations.
but I'm not sure whether anyone had actually done this...
now that really is funny!
True, if they could send light down the same route, this would make sense. However, from the lab's website:
The average 1400 m rock coverage gives a reduction factor of one million in the cosmic ray flux...
So they'd have to dig through somewhere between 1.4 and 732 km of rock to do this, which probably makes this impractical.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
Or it was a computer that used a (int) cast on the result.
Yeah, or their fucking abacus ran out of beads.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I don't just play one on the Internet.
Graduate school at UC Santa Cruz didn't work out as a result of my mental illness, but the people at the Physics department there made it clear they wanted me back after I recovered from getting profoundly paranoid over the fact that North Korea was caught building a nuclear reactor during my second quarter of my first year. A-Bombs aren't really that hard to build; while it takes a lot of cash and a big industrial plant, some US Government committee, in its infinite wisdom, declassified most of the Manhattan Project secrets in 1965. The only still-classified secret is the Plutonium Implosion Bomb's initiator. Spending too much time thinking about World War III and trying to warn the world about it put me in the Dominican Mental Health Unit twice that Spring.
While I never made a career of it, I have some papers in the Astrophysical Journal and Physics Review Letters B. I wrote my UCSC undergraduate thesis on a US Energy Department grant at the Spin Muon Collaboration's facility on the French side of CERN during the Summer of '93. Most UCSC students have to stay on campus to research their thesis, but my advisor Clem Heusch said I had unusual potential.
Clem was looking for Non-Conservation of Lepton Number by using the SMC's Muon beam and highly magnetized Liquid Helium target to look for a Muon going in, scattering off a nucleon (or, more precisely, one of the quarks that make up a neutron or proton), then leaving the interaction having been changed into an Electron or Positron. This would be a violation of one of the most fundamental Laws of Physics, but for reasons I was never really able to grasp, it is speculated that just this might occur naturally in the Universe. If so, it could contribute to the explanation of Dark Matter and other unexplainable phenomena.
The observation of neutrinos traveling faster than light is exciting and unexpected, but not THAT unexpected. Clem's Muon-to-Neutrino search was part of the whole Physics community's effort to revise the Standard Model. The Standard Model is all of the Laws of Physics put together, with the exception of General Relativity - Einstein's gravitational theory. We don't include Gravity because gravity is such a weak force that we cannot collect enough experimental data for the theorists to produce a Quantum Theory of Gravity.
It has been widely agreed for decades that the Standard Model is quite wrong, but only recently are we beginning to identify just how it is wrong. The observation of Neutrino oscillations at CERN a few years ago by blasting an intense beam of them through a bunch of heavily shielded photographic film, then right down the main street of neighboring St. Genis, France was the first experimental proof that the Standard Model really is incorrect. Collecting more measurements of more oscillations will give the theorists some of the experimental data they need to revise the Model.
Neutrinos were originally thought not to oscillate, but some theorist predicted that if they had non-zero mass, they would oscillate as well. What is really exciing about this latest find is not just that C isn't quite the Speed Limit of the Whole Universe, but that massive objects are exceeding lightspeed!
As to why I posted this comment in reply to the above limerick...
Young Lady Bright's Relativistic Limerick has been my very favorite of all limericks ever since I found it in Clifton Fadiman's The Mathematical Magpie at the Moscow, Idaho public library when I was in sixth grade. The fact that I spent so much time reading that book had a lot to do with my physics degee and my career as a software engineer. It was published in the 1950s, but it was still in print last time I checked several years ago. One of my proudest possessions is my own hardback copy that I found in a used bookstore. There was a card inserted in it that indicated it was meant for a book reviewer, so my partic
Request your free CD of my piano music.
So maybe what some people feared has occured: the LHC experiments have altered the vacuum state in earth's vicinity, thus allowing various particles to achieve higher-than-c velocities. Maybe we should recheck today's light speed and see if it changed.
how in the hell is the ratio of mass to energy exactly the speed of light squared?
The same way that the ratio of mass to volume is exactly 1 gram per cubic centimeter of water.
I still maintain that the central ideas of relativity could remain, so long as the value of c is increased to go slightly above the fastest particle with mass. So, just make c just slightly faster than the neutrino. What proof do we have that light can travel at the fastest speed possible anyways?
How can we use this experimental result to make a better HFT system :)
First Post addicts are having a trollgasm over this.
Table-ized A.I.
One of the important properties of neutrinos is that they react very weakly with matter. They can shoot straight through air, stone, metal, or the entire earth without appreciably slowing down or being absorbed or deflected. Light is slowed by physical media because it interacts strongly with matter. It is even possible for ionizing radiation to exceed the speed of light through a medium. When it does it produces Cherenkov radiation, the blue glow we associate with nuclear reactors, which is analogous to a sonic boom. In this experiment, they were shooting the neutrinos at a detector 732 km away, which, due to the curvature of the Earth, would mean angling the emitter down and shooting neutrinos through the Earth's crust. So, exceeding the speed of light through what is basically stone is nothing to write home about.
Neutrinos and tachyons?
The results of this experiment are very exciting and could open new horizons in physics and our knowledge of the world.
However, before throwing causality, as the baby with the bath's water, we must think much about it and analyze it from a broader theoretical framework.
Some studies already postulate the existence of hypothetical particles, the tachyons, whose speed is always greater than the speed of light in vacuum. This will be allowed formally by the equation of relativity, the famous E = mc ^ 2, Einstein's equation, reformulated with complex numbers. Without going into details, let's say that the rest mass of a tachyon is an imaginary number, while its energy is a real number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon)
In addition, some studies suggest that neutrinos could be "tachyonic". As this article from Chodos, 1985. "The neutrino as a tachyon" http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1985PhLB..150..431C
There are still problem with the mass of the neutrino, would be non-zero according to recent experiences... Perhaps, non-zero but imaginary ... Who knows? Let the experts go further!
Regardless, those results fully justify the investment into the CERN's Large Hadron Collider!
What is they mass of a neutrino? Maybe they only sometimes have mass.
Feynman replied that when light passes through matter, the charged particles in that matter oscillate in sympathy with the oscillations of the light's electomagnetic field. But because they are all in a bound state, and because accellerating charged particles causes them to emit light of their own, thereby carrying away energy and so dampening their sympathetic oscillation, the movements of the charged particles in matter is not quite in phase with the waves in the light passing through the medium.
Feynman concluded, "The light emitted by the charge particles in matter interferes with the light passing through the medium" - that is, wave peaks add to wave peaks, and so with troughs, while peaks and troughs together cancel each other - "so that the resulting combination of light waves only appears to move slower than C."
Thus the Photons are always moving at a constant velocity of C, but all the Photons in the medium interact so that passing a Photon through the medium will result in the exit Photon being delayed from the timing you would expect from when the entrance Photon entered the front surface.
I'm not sure I buy that explanation. To appear to move slower than C, the interference would have to exactly cancel out the light for
t >= distance / C,
t < distance / speed of light in medium
and have exactly zero effect on the light for
t >= distance / speed of light in medium
Or in other words - if the first photon leaving the medium isn't the first photon that entered it, what happened to that photon? Why doesn't the same thing happen to the rest of the photons that enter the medium?
Anyway it would mean that transparent objects transmit light in much the same way as fluorescent objects fluoresce - which leads to all sorts of other questions, such as why in one the angle of light leaving is related to the angle of light coming in, but in the other the light leaving it is diffuse; and in one, the light produced is different in phase but in the same wavelength, but in the other the wavelength is different.
for picking this apple?
We have to find Zephram Cochrane! Before they get here!
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Didn't boy genius Jake Barnett suggest he thought there might be another C, ~.9 larger, related to the density of the universe.
This lady was Bright but not bright : the next morning she again joined that flight : So then two made the date : and then four, and then eight : And her spouse got one hell of a fright!
Oldies but goodies.
Be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker. JG Ballard
I am sure they have thought of this and corrected for it, but I thought it might be nice to point out that there is a big difference between a straight line (say like in a beam of neutrinos), and some arbitrary (732km) distance on the earth, which is of course curved.
For all those people talking about the accuracy of GPS, sure when talking about positions on the surface of the earth, however the distance would be different if you are going through the earth in an absolute straight line. Sure the curve of the earth isn't that great, even over a distance of 732km, but it is probably enough to cause 18m of error (or 0.018).
EVEN if they corrected for the curve of the earth, you are likely using an equation that describes the curve as a constant, not as an irregular lump which is what the earth actually is. So unless your equations are taking into consideration the ACTUAL deformity that is the curve between those two points, error may occur.
When you are talking about such small margins of error of "billionths of a second", I'm going to go out on and limb and say one of the first things you should be checking is how accurate that measurement (or calculation) really is.
My money is on an error in the use of a Gaussian function and Monte Carlo simulation to explain most of the bias. A software bug maybe?
How much does the earth crust move in that region?
What If italy moves slowly towards mainland europe creating mountains etc?.
In such a case it is logical anything you send that way arrives sooner then you may think.
I doubt this orange peel we live on sits perfectly still.
But mass travelling AT the speed of light would be!
We had a physics guest lecturer back in the early 80's that predicted something like this, wish I could remember her name. If neutrinos are solitons and interact with nulcei as solitons, then the neutrino that leaves the nucleus leaves the instant the other neutrino arrived. Sort of like when one billiard ball strikes two balls in contact and the second ball flies away. The nucleon density of the earth would determine the percentage of the distance that would be 'skipped' when transisting the earth. An idea of this factor can be obtained by looking at the silicon atom. The ratio of the radius of the silicon nucleus to the size of the silicon atom is about(3.7x10^(-15)) / (111x10^(-12)) or .00034%.
are we measuring the distance above ground, but the measurement is of under ground distance? in a sphere (earth) the outside is longer than the core. probably too obvious, but figure i would ask.
A bit of humor ;)
https://plus.google.com/117387108575161976832/posts/bc986hvNT2C
The main problem I see with this result is the following. In Astrophysics we've seen races between photons and neutrinos before. When you have a supernova explosion we can detect the neutrino flux and see the light from the explosion. Take this example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A
The event took place 168,000 light-years away from Earth. If the CERN results were correct the neutrinos would have arrived more than 4 years before we could see the explosion. But this is not what happened. They arrived only 3 hours earlier (a difference that is easily explained by the neutrinos being produced in the core of the star while the light comes from the surface). This is in direct contradiction with the notion that neutrinos are significantly faster than light. No doubt we'll learn a lot of fundamental physics from the CERN experiment but probably not what is being hyped in the media
Hmmm... somehow my supernova comment got removed (perhaps it was redundant with a previous discussion)
Anyhow, this strip is relevant:
https://plus.google.com/117387108575161976832/posts/bc986hvNT2C
The point is that "Special relativity postulates the existence of a critical speed that sets the limits to how fast any signal or information bit can propagate. Whether this speed actually coincides with the speed of light is not so relevant"
The difference between NASA and CERN: NASA: ZOMG WE FOUND ALIENS [when ONE person MIGHT have found life that subsisted on arsenate ONCE] CERN: Hey guys... We might have found a particle moving faster than light... Maybe. Want to check our work? We tried it a few (thousand) times, but we might have made a mistake somewhere. (PS If true this will upend a century of physics.)
Looks accurate to me. There was an experiment, and it indicated faster than light neutrinos. It's likely to be wrong, and the scientists involved have admitted as much, but they're asking others to conduct the same experiment in an attempt to replicate or refute the result.
The evidence is far from conclusive
If the headline said 'CERN experiment conclusively proves faster than light neutrinos' you'd have a point there. "indicates" is fair enough.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Outside of special relativity, having particles travelling faster than the background speed of light doesn't necessarily introduce causality violations, if the local /velocity/ of light, at that location and moment, in that same direction, is even greater.
Consider the case of a drifting particle falling into a black hole from null infinity. The inward velocity of the particle would be expected to hit v=c at the event horizon, and to continue increasing (unobserved) as the particle continued to fall, to an arbitrarily high multiple of background lightspeed. But the particle doesn't illegally time-reverse, because it never overtakes its own signals (which are falling inwards even faster). So gravitational event horizons provide an example of predicted (censored) super-fast motion, without involving exotica like negative energy-densities. Like Newcomb's old argument against heavier-than-air people-carrying craft, general disproofs of superfast motion are mathematically tidy, but not necessarily physically reliable.
Outside of black hole problems, super-fast motion can be legal if you use a relativistic acoustic metric instead of the Minkowski metric (in an r.a.m., the motion of a particle is associated with a local offset in nearby light-velocities, allowing the particle to move faster than background c without ever exceeding local c).
Relativistic acoustic metrics are fun, and seem to reconcile quantum mechanics with several key aspects of general relativity - they're tentatively used by some people exploring "quantum gravity" options, when modelling Hawking radiation.
... The reason why we don't use relativistic acoustic metrics seems to be partly historical/social: Special relativity got there first and established the Minkowski metric as a standard, and some relationships come out differently with an r.a.m. than they do with special relativity, so we tend to say that unless someone has convincing evidence that says otherwise, the SR version of events is considered to be "canon". And it's difficult for evidence to be considered convincing if it runs counter to one of the best-known scientific theories, so there's a kind of positive-feedback loop in operation.
Mainstream relativity guys tend not to study r.a.m.'s, not because anyone's come up with a logical reason why they shouldn't work, but because they're told that SR-compliance is mandatory for any credible relativistic field theory, and it's generally thought that violations of SR (like particles moving faster than background c) simply don't happen. So other than the quantum gravity guys, almost nobody's been looking at this class of relativity theory, and the QG guys tend to stop at the point where the thing starts to diverge from special relativity.
Short Answer: Yes, if this thing is right, it probably involves rewriting the physics rulebook, and probably junking special relativity, but ... no, the requirement for special relativity was never really as strong as many people seemed to believe. Yes, losing special relativity would be major from a theoretical and social point of view, but no, it's not too difficult to construct a relativistic alternative, if you're prepared to lose the simplifying assumption of flat spacetime.
(So yes, it might simply be a duff experiment. But it's not yet safe or sensible to assume that that's the case).
Have a Cool Day,
Eric 0955706831
Eric Baird
I have a theory that predicts FTL: http://amzn.com/B005NLU7OU I try to tell everybody General Relativity is wrong since 2009. Finite Theory explains all phenomenons including the constitution of a black hole. -Phil
"This is the live Webcast from CERN on Friday September 23, 2011. Given the potential far-reaching consequences of the OPERA experiment --- which observes a neutrino beam from CERN 730 km away at Italy's INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory, indicating that the neutrinos travel at a velocity 20 parts per million above the speed of light --- independent measurements are needed before the effect can either be refuted or firmly established, according to a CERN statement just issued. The OPERA collaboration has therefore decided to open the result to broader scrutiny."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFz3fJMJ-yA
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” - Carl Sagan
Just a possible explanation off the top of my head:
Neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light because they don't interact with the fabric of space-time which slightly slows down everything else. So the neutrino speed is the actual speed maximum.
I wouldn't say that if the experiment is verified that SRT or GRT has to be kicked out immediately.
I am by no way an expert on this, but why should the vacuum not have a susceptibility depending on the energy range? For GeV energy range this experiment seems to be consistent with the earlier experiments. SN1987A observations happened in another energy range AFAIU (any experts here?).
So it could be that in the limit in which we measured c up to now (low energies), c is not the c appearing in relativity.
Wouldn't shock me too much.
From what I understand about relativity and such physics, particles can travel faster than light (iirc like Tachyons) and (somehow) they don't violate either the relativity or causality principles. Again, I'm no physicist, but the only limitation I know of is that any particle can't accelerate up to the speed of light because "e=mc2" would mean the acceleration process would require infinite energy. However, nothing stops a particle from being created/converted/whatever with a speed already greater than light (again, Tachyons).
So I ask you god almighty slashdotters :P, isn't it possible that for some reason these neutrinos were created with a speed higher than light but there can be other cases where they aren't? And if some particles like the Tachyon, however theoretical, don't violate relativity or causality, can't these FTL-neutrinos behave the same way?
how likely is it that the speed of the neutrino exceeding the speed of light is so close to the speed of light? methinks not likely hence - systematic error as pointed above that closed the matter for me
I send this message from the future.
Thank you for sharing with us. I also enjoy teaching physics and intend to get "Feynman's Lectures" for motivation.
Ed Battle
Don't know if the news got to you people outside Italy but.. the Italian Minister of Education said publicly that the Italian Government participated in the building of the 700km CERN-Gran Sasso tunnel with 45mln euros...
Well I didn't know there was one, did you?
If you google "cern gelmini" you'll find any kind of jokes about this.. have fun.
peut etre ils on decouvert que ils ont fait un erreur dans le calcul de la distance france italie ,avec qoui ils ont mesure , avec le pas, la rulette, les lens de satelit avec aberation de prisme de l'atmosphere des imbeciles de savants qui travaillent avec d'equipement de milliards d'euro, il faut les licencier tous , des imbecilles
i belive out there, there many partikel more faster than light. it depend our instrumet to able to detec them or not.
Does anyone remember a few months ago when they were saying the LHC had to potential to distort / warp time...
Could this be what is happening, and the reason why they have been able to replicate this 15,000 times is because of the specific neutrinos being used?
The other ones slipped over a booster neutrino they do not count :-) ;-))
(wonder how many others made this joke
Given that pretty much every tool we have seems to be limited by the speed of light-- the electrons that travel in the measurement instruments and in the computers for example-- if there was an object moving faster than the speed of light, how would you detect it? We "observe" at the speed of light. Put another way: consider the state of technology and the breadth of science during Galileo's time. Given his knowledge and tools, how would he "observe" microwaves? His science barely has any (if any) explanation for anything other than what he can see and measure with his eyes. Is it that nothing can exceed the speed of light (according to special relativity) OR is it the case that nothing we are able to measure given our tools and understanding can exceed the speed of light? Is the universe/multiverse truly limited or it only limited by our ability to understand and perceive it?
I just read the paper regarding the experiment with Neutrinos apparently traveling faster than light, and looking at the geometry of the experiment: Neutrinos travelling from West to East through rock in the Earth's crust (i.e. traveling with the rotation of the Earth) and the fact that they are relying on GPS systems with a common view point on a satellite in space, it appears that Frame Dragging might be the cause of the result...
Read this Extract from Wikipedia regarding Frame Dragging:
"Frame dragging effects
Rotational frame-dragging (the Lense–Thirring effect) appears in the general principle of relativity and similar theories in the vicinity of rotating massive objects. Under the Lense–Thirring effect, the frame of reference in which a clock ticks the fastest is one which is revolving around the object as viewed by a distant observer. This also means that light traveling in the direction of rotation of the object will move past the massive object faster than light moving against the rotation, as seen by a distant observer. It is now the best-known effect, partly thanks to the Gravity Probe B experiment. Qualitatively, frame-dragging can be viewed as the gravitational analog of electromagnetic induction."
The point is that the Dragging effect happens to differing degrees depending on its proximity to mass. As the Neutrinos passed through the rock (i.e in very close proximity to the rotating mass) there may be scope for an error in the Frame Dragging calculation, especially if GPS assumes signals traveling through space.
Regards,
Declan Traill
At what point does this translate into nifty science-fiction-style real-world applications? A comic on the subject: www.cinemabums.com
I just read the paper regarding the experiment with Neutrinos apparently traveling faster than light, and looking at the geometry of the experiment: Neutrinos traveling from West to East through rock in the Earth's crust (i.e. traveling with the rotation of the Earth) and the fact that they are relying on GPS systems with a common view point on a satellite in space, it appears that Frame Dragging might be the cause of the result... Read this Extract from Wikipedia regarding Frame Dragging: "Frame dragging effects Rotational frame-dragging (the Lense–Thirring effect) appears in the general principle of relativity and similar theories in the vicinity of rotating massive objects. Under the Lense–Thirring effect, the frame of reference in which a clock ticks the fastest is one which is revolving around the object as viewed by a distant observer. This also means that light traveling in the direction of rotation of the object will move past the massive object faster than light moving against the rotation, as seen by a distant observer. It is now the best-known effect, partly thanks to the Gravity Probe B experiment. Qualitatively, frame-dragging can be viewed as the gravitational analog of electromagnetic induction." The point is that the Dragging effect happens to differing degrees depending on its proximity to mass. As the Neutrinos passed through the rock (i.e in very close proximity to the rotating mass) there may be scope for an error in the Frame Dragging calculation, especially if GPS assumes signals traveling through space. Perhaps if a similar experiment was carried out on Neutrinos traveling from East to West, rather than West to East, then a travel time of 60us slower than light speed would be recorded, rather than the 60us faster than light speed of the experiment just performed! Regards, Declan Traill
You were rated troll because they accounted for all of the time settings. Clocks that are accurate to within one nanosecond that sync every 1 microsecond.
The possibility for error from timing is less than 6 nanoseconds. Which is accounted for in the margin of error at 10 nanoseconds.
To be fair the most they could possibly say for a margin of error was around 20 nanoseconds and they would be making some large assumptions as to the inaccuracy of some of their most expensive equipment to do so. The neutrinos got there 60 nanoseconds earlier than expected. Therefore the results are STILL significant.
Fair enough, I don't remember it being written in the article but if these are the facts you can't really disagree can you?
-- no sig today
Its not in the article but it is in the linked-to conference that they held at CERN where they went "Look, we would like to publish this, and we're not saying its a discovery just yet, we think this needs more people to look at it."
Then they fielded about 4 hours of questions from some of the brightest minds available and shot them all down.
By "the linked-to conference" do you mean the one that was supposed to have a web stream? I wanted to watch it but couldn't get the stream up from any of the providers...
-- no sig today
Perhaps you might look at a letter that was published in the South Wales Evening Post, 28th Sept, concerning this claim of the discovery of faster than light neutrinos
All this recent talk about CERN having defeated Einstein by creating particles travelling ‘faster than light’ is sheer nonsense. Light is said to travel at the speed c, which is three hundred thousand kilometers per second. However, people who know their Relativity and how it has developed since 1905 know that this is not really a speed. It is a dimensional constant giving the ratio of conventional units of metres to those of seconds. To claim that there are speeds faster than c is therefore sheer nonsense. It is like saying that there can be ‘lengths longer than 39 inches to the metre’ or ‘weights heavier than 2.2 pounds to the kilogram’. What would you say to a traffic policeman who charged you with speeding faster than 1.6 kilometers to the mile? ‘Constable,’ you would have to say, ‘that is sheer gobbledygook!’ And so is what they are claiming at CERN.
Relativity is notoriously difficult for the layman to grasp. But it is absolutely impossible if we keep thinking of the constant c as a ‘speed’. A constant is a constant and a speed is a speed. Failing to distinguish the two is a common mistake which leads to mystification – like thinking of a proper-time-instantaneous quantum jump from an atom one laboratory to an atom in another as ‘faster than light’.
N. V. (Viv) Pope
Hon Prof. Of Relativistic Quantum Physics,
IITPM, Prato, Italy, (retd.)
Present address: 10 West End,. Penclawdd, Swansea,
Tel. Swansea 850764
Website www.poams.org
Now we should ask ourselves
Or qualified scientists
If the particles are so small
Can we really observe them
However if all the measurements done once
Upon a time were correct should we
Justify the scientists for their lack of knowledge?