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Faster-Than-Light Particle Results To Be Re-Tested
surewouldoutlaw writes "After the astonishing news from CERN that the OPERA experiment had detected neutrinos traveling faster than light speed, challenging Einstein's theory of special relativity, there has been some skepticism over the results. Now Fermilab, near Chicago, has announced it will attempt to replicate the experimental results within four to six months."
And I posted it tomorrow, as well!
So if we don't get the results by next month, we can assume the experiments failed to hold up?
of Tesla being right. Hopefully people look into more of his research in the future.
If you didn't see this coming, then you don't understand science...
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
The results are in!
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The barkeep says 'We don't serve faster-than-light particles in here'. A neutrino walks into a bar.
Confirmation of the results of an experiment by an independent party is standard practice in the scientific community. Without it, the findings wouldn't even be considered completely valid! Nothing to see here...
They already did the experiment, and actually found similar results but did not claim any significance. Of course they are going to repeat this, once they finish kicking themselves.
...if the Neutrino was a filthy cheat running a hidden nitrous bottle.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The process is working.
The scientists at CERN asked for peer review and checking of their methodology. This announcement means that at least on paper the method was near-perfect for Fermilab to be committing resources in the near future to prove/disprove it.
If they succeed in recreating the measurements, doesn't it just mean that c was set at too low a value, and that the true speed to light in a vacuum is slightly faster than originally thought?
Maybe neutrinos travel closer to c because they are less slowed by the absence of vacuum than other particles.
Also, why do people say that it is like going back in time? Was the message received before it was sent?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Science: it works, bitches!
http://xkcd.com/54/
I did have a college physics covering relativity but it was a long time ago. Correct me if I am wrong, but Einsteins Special Relativity theory doesn't prohibit speeds faster than light. It just prohibits speeds EQUAL to the speed of light. If so, It would be problematic to accelerate past the speed pf light or to decelerate to slower than the speed of light.
And re-tested and re-tested and re-tested.
Six if they don't. ;)
I talk about stuff.
OPERA has just found that either neutrinos travel 0.03% faster than photons we've measured, or their equipment has an unknown systematic error. Assuming there's no equipment error, I would find it more palatable to assume that light around Earth travels a bit below c and that neutrinos travel closer to c. What we think of as vacuum could really be a medium with refractive index 1.0003, perhaps due to a uniform background of weakly-interacting particles (maybe even dark matter) that affect photons but not neutrinos.
I have a physics undergrad degree; if there's someone here with better qualifications, would you care to weigh in on the idea that c could be 0.03% faster than the speed of light we measure on Earth?
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
Random question:
What kind of technology and materials would we need to get the giant Fermilab etc. down from square kilometres down to square metres or even inches? Would cheap fusion energy, or room-temperature super-conductors, or limitless supplies of carbon nanotubes/diamond/graphene help reach that particular goal?
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Sorry guys. I'm not trying to put him down but Phil really isn't the one we should be turning to on this question. While he brings up good and valid points the bottom line is that he even said in his twitter feed that this isn't his area to speak on. I respect the man for his work with BA and in the community in general but he's just not the best source of understaing on the subject. Something tells me that better sources for information on this are keeping their mouths closed for a good reason even if it's nothing more than professionalism on their part.
object A moving .50001 the speed of light. Object B moving .5 the speed of light moving the exact opposite direction away from object A.
You are on object A, can you see object B?
I thought they already figured out faster than light speed via quantum physics entanglement.
Another thought experiment. a 1" rod 1 light year long. you move it 1/16 of a centimeter. How long does it take for the movement to register at the other end?
A: its instant, for it does not need to move any faster than the time it took you to move it.
I want a neutrinos modem so that my downloads are finished before I click on the links!
If they can go faster than light, then they may have already completed their retest. The results of that test were that they cannot go faster than light.
The theory of Relativity still holds true, what this experiment (if it's accurate) changes is our idea of matter and causality: if neutrinos have imaginary mass, they are allowed to traver faster than light, as tachyons; and causality may have to be revised, from a onward moving arrow to a regular dimension, in which the future can influence the past.
I can only assume that they've corrected for General Relativity. Everyone seems to be pointing to the obvious potential sources of error: knowing when the neutrinos are created, knowing when they arrive, knowing the distance that they've traveled.
What about variations in the Earth's gravitational field between the two clocks? Or along the path that the neutrinos follow? You can't call the planet a point-source of gravity - the density of matter is quite lumpy.
I haven't seen a back-of-the-envelope calculation for this...maybe it's orders of magnitudes impossible? Would it require a tiny black hole to throw the timing off by 60ns...or would a big uranium deposit be enough? I could probably do the Lorenz transforms for Special Relativity myself, but General is a bit beyond me!
...ago, of course.
A million internet points for the person who commercializes this in to a faster than light inter-planatary communication network and calls it subspace.
3e8 is here to stay in my dungeon
There is no way I am relearning electronics math after replacing 3e8 -- with what? , a new unknown variable!?
Radios and TV's will be fixed with existing 3e8 test equipment and 3e8 math.
I'll make a prediction, even if there is a particle traveling faster than 3e8,
it will be a particle which people who work with 3e8
1. don't care about, unless the discussion is shielding
2. can't measure
3. can't use
4. the timing for chips will still be timing for chips based on 3e8
5. Joe 6 Pack will be hard pressed to put a particle going faster than 3e8 to practical use
3e8 is here to stay, it's the LAW for now.
with v > C
I'm not even remotely qualified to comment on this, but I seem to remember light being affected by gravity and thus the mass around it, where as neutrinos are virtually unaffected by normal matter. What this says to me is the neutrinos are showing us what the actual speed limit of the universe is compared to what we think it should be as an observer sitting on a giant ball of gravity rich mass. Basically, in space, they go the same speed, which is why the neutrinos and photons from a distant stellar event show up here at the same time, but on earth, the results might be slightly different.
My gut tells me that this will end up shoring up special relativity and perhaps adding a new understanding of our universe without shattering everything as so many are saying.
With the small but consistent error in the results, what I have not seen is how you know that this isn't a measurement that the distance did not change.
As the underground tunnel between Swiss and Italy is not finished yet.
Indeed.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
...these results were calculated in ITALY.
I don't know about you, but according to my experience, NOTHING runs on time there.
Not even neutrinos.
So the idea that they arrived early? hahaha, clearly a clock error.
-Styopa
This experiment has not actually been conducted yet, but due to the faster-than-light nature of the experiment we are receiving the results here in the past.
This article would make a lot more sense if it read, "According to scientists at CERN, faster-than-light results have again been produced earlier today, after testing equipment was set up for an experiment scheduled for this Thursday, September 29th. The experiment will still be initiated as normal on Thursday, to avoid continuity problems, stated the scientists."
When I get my neutrino modem, I will use it to send my first post from the future.
But seriously - I can't imagine this being possible. If this is true - we'd be seeing distant supernovae on the neutrino detectors years before they flare up un the night sky. As far as I know the two events are measured within seconds of each other, even when they are millions of light years away. 0.03% of millions a years is much much more than seconds.
Run with the lemmings, and you'll get your feet wet.
if It arrives before it left - it's a bean counters wet dream they can check the results of the retest before they start and not bother doing the experiment if the result is disappointing saving all that cash.
I have to wonder....
Did they account for the rotation of the earth. The beam was fired from west to east. That would mean that the rotation of the earth would have to be added to the speed of light because the detector is not fixed, it is in motion toward the beam with the rotation of the earth. That speed would be something like 900 miles. I wonder if they took that into account......
If the measured distances is 20 meters too short, this would explain the error. I agree they should be able to measure the distance to 30 centimeters by high resolution GPS. But I suspect distance is the source of the error.
Polywater?
If you had an ideal incompressible solid, you might very well have created the first immovable object.
If in can't have a compression wave, it can't move.
When will these so-called "scientists" ever realize that nothing can move faster than the speed of light which includes these "ghost-particles"?
There is nothing to be gained by any of this ouija science.
... It's not yet clear how to make sense of this result.)
Of course we both know that it's 99.9% probably experimental error - they just havn't found it yet, and now they've asked the americans to help them find the error.
Run with the lemmings, and you'll get your feet wet.
You could make it of neutronium.
(just stand back a ways, if you did try to touch it, you would be sucked into the resulting black hole
That's how much of an error in the presumed distance between the stations is required to explain a 60 ns discrepancy. Bearing in mind that neutrinos travel "as the crow flies" along a geodesic (effectively a straight line) between the two points, where light signals in the form of e.g. radio waves or in optical fibers, in addition to being retarded by an index of refraction, must follow an arc length along the Earth's surface if not worse.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
One might say, even at the speed of... ah, skip it.
I've always through Einsteins laws were bullshit, no offense to anyone who believes them. "Bending time" is ridiculous, and always has been.
Using some string left over from string theory?
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Einstein's laws might be imperfect, but they are no more bullshit than Newtons laws are bullshit - Newtons laws are fine for speeds near zero, but very much imperfect for speeds near c.
And we already knew that Einstein's laws as you call them were imperfect before this, because quantum physics don't agree with Einstein's laws, see ERP experiment, also with the idea that here might be a smallest unit of time or space.
Science is the search for perfection within humanity, while God is the search for perfection elsewhere.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
This thing is going to be tested again and again until they find a way to turn this into FTL travel.
Probably they will find that the neutrino doesn't travel faster than light, but instead the reference light bean somehow travels 20 nano seconds slower than expected.
Nothing to see here.
OR there is "dark matter" involved that slows down the light beam.
Privacy is terrorism.
Are neutrinos affected by gravity? If not, then I can see that they would not be affected by the curved space time of Earth and would appear to us (on Earth) to be going faster than light when both light and neutrinos are actually going at c. From the point of view of the neutrinos, a light beam (if there was a vacuum tunnel going through the Earth) would appear to curve towards the center. Both light and neutrino beam would be going at the same speed, but the light beam would have a longer distance to traverse (from the frame of the neutrino). In our reference frame, the neutrino beam appears to be going faster than c.
I'm not referring to the distance we measure, because our rulers are also curved. I'm asking if neutrinos are affected by the space time curvature created by Earth's gravity.
Based off this assumption being true, then this experiment repeated in space (away from the strong gravity inside the Earth) would not yield the same results. The beams would appear to be moving at the same speed.
I think to reconcile this with the supernova and the inconsistencies there is simply that the burst of light and neutrinos from different supernova are affected by different gravity fields on their way to Earth.
If it's already well known how gravity affects neutrinos, then please explain and don't flame.
What if neutrino propagation is unaffected by gravity? Time slows down in a gravitational well, as I recall, relative to being outside the well. In fact, GPS satellites have to compensate for this. What if this space time effect does not apply to neutrinos? Are the neutrinos seen to travel faster than c, or faster than light in our gravity well?
I haven't thought through if the question actually makes sense: it's a bit early on a Monday for my brain to deal with relativity, but I thought I'd raise the issue. Perhaps someone younger, more caffienated, or both, as a better idea.
Planck constant is in fact a momentum of photon. Having only this knowledge you can calculate it's mass.
Going further, you will found that photon is positively charged.
And that's why they are getting measurement errors on both LHC and OPERA.
By properly calculating elementary particles based on proper math and constants you can evaluate measurements.
All measurements are wrong, no wonder they got this one wrong as well.
I've been experimenting with OPERA too - and it really is the fastest browser I have tried.
Just a layman's idea but, could it be that due to some kind of gravitational interference, light is slowed down just a tad around Earth while some neutrino's are not thus allowing them to be measured as going faster than light?
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.
Wow that's quite a concept. To me that idea smacks of some unknown type of energy which has the potential of being converted into regular mass. However, it would seem to me complex mass would be impossible because as the particle's mass oscillated between the real and complex states its speed would likewise be respectively slower and then faster than c. Heh, imagine the shock waves from something breaking the light barrier a couple billion times per second, and the energy dumped into entropy. I don't think a particle with complex mass would make it very far. More like a one way ride...
Pure imaginary mass (the tachyon) is pretty neat to think about though. What kind of state could mass be in its "potential" form? The old E=mc^2 certainly implies that you can convert energy into mass, but I'm not aware of anybody who has created mass out of pure energy yet.
Clickety Click
732 km = 732000m .0024 comes out to 305,000,000m/s.
732000 /
That seems a bit clean of a number to be a coincidence.
Maybe the speed of light really is 305,000,000m/s and light has an undetectable mass by current measurement equipment, giving it a slower speed than a neutrino.
Think about it.
This is an honest question, not snark - I'm not nearly as scientifically grounded as many Slashdotters. Didn't quantum mechanics develop well before we had high-energies to play with? I've had the impression that we've known since the early 20th century that Newtonian physics wasn't complete, and that one of the amazing things about quantum physics is the ability of the early thought-experiments to get proven out by later real-world experiments and even incorporated into engineering principles (a la GPS). Is that accurate? And if true, what's the modern-day analogue to quantum physics here?
There's a nice summary here: http://theconversation.edu.au/neutrinos-and-the-speed-of-light-not-so-fast-3513 As usual, the media is reporting this as far more certain than the scientists think it is. As the article says "[the scientists] seem to be the only ones not jumping to conclusions just yet."
We've seen neutrinos from supernova arrive 4 hours earlier than light. But that from 170 light years distance.
If the difference was caused by neutrinos traveling faster than light, speed difference is roughly 1000 times smaller, than what was measured recently.
And if you say that well, neutrinos can travel at different speeds, it's hard to imagine a theory, where neutrinos produced by supernova produce slower neutrinos than those produced at CERN.
In other words: most likely it's some unaccounted detail in experiment.
I don't see people mentioning this glaring factor in this experiment: the neutrinos are traveling through SOLID MATTER, ie. Swiss and Italian earth, whereas c is the speed of light in VACUUM.
If the CERN measurements are correct, it might mean that there is some anomaly when neutrinos travel through the core of other particles (protons, neutrons etc). This explanation is consistent with SN1987A observation since the distance between SN1987A and Earth is mainly vacuum.
Bad physics alert: Possibly neutrino's top speed in vacuum is still 'c' but when traveling through matter it can somehow enter the core of a neutron or proton and exit simultaneously at the other end. If you sum up the lengths of all these core particles, it might give us the missing 18 meters.
Amoeba News - Multicellular organisms exist! Oh the horror...
First off, everyone, including the media needs to get the facts straight.. Relativity was not the brain-child of Einstein. In fact, it was one of the earliest "Facebook Scams" meaning... Einstein took the ideas of Henri Poincaré and reworked them... Henri Poincaré was the father of Relativity. Second. I hope the Theory of Relativity IS proven wrong. It is too constricting for us... Why limit our cognitive to theories that constrict the creativeness of the mind??
I am a firm believer that space is an entity and not a lack thereof. That is why most mass cannot break through
the light speed barrier. The neutron may be too small to collide with space and is not restricted by it. Remember there
is no speed without collision. This is why gravity compounds with increasing speeds. The only aspect of this theory
which is unknown to me is why space wan'ts to fill the *voids in it created by mass in a persistent way. Maybe mass creates
a vacuum in a space following with a timeline which cannot be studied. Analogically, It could be a vacuum in which
molasses is trying to fill. Doing this very slowly and without much force. But maybe I can crack the code. Why would
space be pushing back in a seemingly perpetual way?
Bonus: Traveling faster than light will put an object outside the fabric of the space/gravity boundaries. This effectively
causing a infinite speed increase with the remaining thrust used to achieve it. The result, whatever lies beyond our reality as
we know it.
Geez. Look up Tachyons. They are a theoretical massive particle traveling faster than the speed of light which is totally consistent with all theories of relativity. So basically everyone who talks as if it invalidates anything are just speaking talking points they read somewhere. You need to see the speed of light limit is valid for both sides. Relativity posits subluminal particles can never move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, and superluminal particles can never move slower than the speed of light in a vacuum. Get yo shit straight!
I have talked about this with my friend who is a physicist at CERN. And the measurements in the experiment are not very "solid". They can only measure very indirectly when neutrinos being emitted. Their methodology can be microseconds off, they are using statistics to increase precision, and 60ns error is still very low. So chances that they have made a mistake when they measured neutrinos faster than light, are about 99.999%. The experiment should be redone, but not worth a BIG media announcement, which would most likely only make them look silly.