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A Small Glimmer of Hope For Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos
sciencehabit writes "The CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva has confirmed Wednesday's report that a loose fiber-optic cable may be behind measurements that seemed to show neutrinos outpacing the speed of light. But the lab also says another glitch could have caused the experiment to underestimate the particles' speed. The other effect concerns an oscillator that gives its readings time stamps synchronized to GPS signals. Researchers think correcting for an error in this device would actually increase the anomaly in neutrino velocity, making the particles even speedier than the earlier measurements seemed to show."
Well, if FTL works, it will have gone back in time to be sooner than that.
Sorry, but they have found two errors already. I'm not going to buy extremely outlandish claims with two known failures already throwing off the results.
Sorry, CERN, but you need to pick up the workmanship before you can be taken seriously.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Only on Slashdot would arn armchair critic post crap about CERN's 'workmanship' late on a Friday night.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I should also add that I will be conducting my own experiments in my basement with a neutrino cannon, flashlight and stop watch. If I see anything interesting, I'll post the results here.
If you want anything done right, you have to do it yourself!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I'm thinking CERN should run another batch of tests after they review their equipment. That's the only way to get some concrete proof without being subject to the prejudice that people throw around.
It's a good thing that no one, in the scientific community, or otherwise, cares if you take them seriously.
They care when they need money, and citizens are voting for givernments that will or won't give it them.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2686981&cid=39131577
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
E = MC^2 * (1 + ($M - $P ) / L ) + ( Ic/Ir )
Where:
E = Energy
M = Mass
C = Speed of light
M = Monster cable
P = PC Warehouse cable
L = Length of cable
Ic = Interval between calibration scheduled
Ir = Interval calibration required
Doing measurements like this is extremely tricky, as it exceeds the usual equipment precision by a lot. I expect that confirmation either way will at least require months, possibly years. I would not be surprised if they need to recalibrate a lot of equipment and may have to build some especially for this experiment. Anyways. in the course of doing so, they will learn a lot and the improved measurement techniques developed will be available in the future. This is science at work. I do not find any fault with the researchers, just the press coverage. But the press has never understood how science works or what scientists do.
Extraordinary claims also require extraordinary proof. So the original measurement would not have been enough anyways, even if no flaws were found. I also seem to remember that they never claimed FTL neutrinos, but an effect they could not explain, leaving it open whether this was a measurement error or something not consistent with current physical theory.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Obviously they found FTL speed and are hiding it from everyone. No way they'd let this information out with the situation our world is in now.
Praise Jesus~!
Hail Satan~!
Allahu akbar~!
Thats why you have to do all your science from scratch. No handholding.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
The fault is not with CERN but the press coverage. The claims out of CERN was an effect they could not explain, and that was the literal truth. Now they are getting deeper into it and finding flaws, which is not a surprise when working this close to what is possible with current technology. Before they can reliably say either way, they will need to do a lot more experiments and have independent verification. The scientists never claimed otherwise. Who you should stop taking seriously is journalists writing nonsense about things they do not understand.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Just to clarify, the FTL claim was bordering on a measurement error from the very start, it was painfully obvious that they were using a skewed meter and measured the same error many times with it, for me, this confirms more then it contradicts the constant.
sarcasm meter must be on the fritz again - all i pick up is asshole.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
I think that at this point they ought to establish two different links using different technologies, for the data, in parallel, if they can. There they'll be able to say "Oh. now we're not sure which one is correct." :)
I believe Wizard Tim would say "Three links, I say three. No more and no less is the number." And something about swallows, coconuts, and neutrinos.
Where can I get me one them neutrino cannons?
sarcasm meter must be on the fritz again - all i pick up is asshole.
Or perhaps you're just anal
How does that explain OPERA groups results then? Do they not meet your standard either?
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
Regardless of the outcome, there is a good side effect of all this. All the equipment will be checked like crazy. Everything is going to be blueprinted to perfection. We might even advance the whole science of measurement. We might come up with better procedures for QA that could be transferred to other experiments. I hope influential people are taking notes and applying what they learn to other situations.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
What matters is what's real, not whether you 'buy' it.
In this case, it's win-win for science. Either we get knowledge of FTL neutrinos, or we improve our measuring techniques/instruments. Who can complain about either scenario, merely because we don't come up with the answer immediately?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
At this point, can we just call it Schrodinger's neutrino and say that it is both faster and slower than light?
Just reverse the tachyon field on your deflector array, and then inject a stream of polarons into the positronic matrix.
Jeez, do I have to do everything around here?
Very much on point. Science results are at best only as good as the equipment and calibration that go into the measurements and as everybody except the so very smart scientists at CERN who decided to publish highly questionable results, it turns out now that there appear to have been faults in both.
What's more troublesome is the rush to publish these bad results and the resulting media show that can only make science look bad.
Bad science has that effect.
If you have a theory in which you are x% confident you shouldn't be publishing results that conflicts with that theory unless your confidence in your experimental apparatus, calibration and analysis are better than x%. Instead, you should say, "Gosh, it's a whole lot more likely that there's something wrong in my experiment than that the theory is wrong."
It would be damned hard to design an experiment that's sufficiently reliable to call relativity into question at this point. These guys should have their Ph.D.'s impounded until they grow some humility and common sense.
Actually, that's just the current paradigm. It's certainly not the only paradigm.
Science begets technology which begets economic growth. If scientists wanted to make money, they wouldn't have any problems... they'd just have to start doing things differently. A lot of research is done by grants that end up being public knowledge that is published in peer-reviewed journals and it's all academia. If they wanted to privatize and get out of the academic world, it would probably be bad for society as a whole, but pretty damn good for scientists.
It's basically the idea of peace on earth, goodwill to all men, and that kind of thing. Pretty much our whole economic engine has been created by scientists. They should really be lauded as heroes for all that they do and how little they do it for.
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
Vasquez: [after barely surviving the humilation of a loose fiber-optic cable] Okay. We have several canisters of neutrinos. I say we go back in there and remeasure the whole fuckin' experiment.
Hicks: It's worth the try, but we don't know if that's gonna affect anything.
Hudson: Let's just bug out and call it even, Mat! What are we even talking about this for?
Ripley: I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Hudson: Fuckin' A!
Burke: Hold on a second. This installation has a substantial dollar value attached to it.
Ripley: They can *bill* me.
Burke: Okay, I know this is an emotional moment for all of us. I know that. But let's not make snap judgments, please. This is clearly an important experiment we're dealing with and I don't think that you or I, or *anybody*, has the right to arbitrarily kill it.
Ripley: Wrong.
Vasquez: Yeah, watch us.
Hudson: Maybe you haven't been keeping up on current events, but we just got our asses kicked, pal!
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
According to my advisor, this error would have resulted in points marked off if made in the course of an undergraduate lab. Step it up, experimentalists! While you're at it, go ahead and observe Higgs so the high energy theory job market picks up.
I should also add that I will be conducting my own experiments in my basement with a neutrino cannon, flashlight and stop watch. If I see anything interesting, I'll post the results here.
Ha! Unlikely! I don't see duct tape on your list. How do you expect to be taken seriously if you aren't using the miracle tool of the modern age? What next, cold fusion without a salad shooter? Pshaw!
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
They didn't say the theory was wrong. What they said is we have a weird result and we can't find out why its showing up. You're mad at science writers who blow things out of proportion instead of saying the blunt truth. They had a weird result and were trying to find out what went wrong, period. Of course speculation about 'what if' it was right would happen, but that's starkly different from you're claim that they released a *statement* that current theory was *wrong*.
I want to believe in extreme possiblities
Once an impossible result shows up then they check their equipment? I think their calibration procedure must have got pushed off into the future just like the Nutrino's.
Science doesn't work that way. It's not "should we believe him that there was a wolf", it's "is his account plausible as a real wolf sighting, is there any wolf traces and should we expend resources to try and confirm/disprove his claim"
Yes, they found one result "too good to be true" and now they're checking that result. If you'd RTFA (outlandish, I know) you'd notice this snippet at the end:
The two effects will get a new round of tests in May, when the two labs are scheduled to make velocity measurements with short-pulsed beams designed to give readings much more precise than scientists have achieved so far.
It's more like CERN isn't going to pull any punches and will release all the information they have about things instead of holding it back to make themselves look good.
Hell, some people seem to think CERN only did one experiment then screamed about faster than light. Instead, they did hundreds if not THOUSANDS of experiments before releasing a paper with a cautioning tone, asking for others to attempt replication or determine what could be the issue.
The fact that they found two *potential* issues, doesn't detract from the fact that they're an extremely cautious and skeptical group.
Only if you want it done right. Or at all.
Richard Feynman said, "Physics is like sex. It may have practical uses but that's not why we do it." Anyone smart enough to acquire an advanced STEM degree could do plenty well making money if all they cared about was making money - we do it because we love learning and creating and designing.
Simple versions are actually quite easy to make. All you need is some aluminum (i.e. foil), a weak radioactive source (available by mail order), a controllable current source (probably the most expensive bit), and something to give it shape. A cardboard tube would work fine. Now just point the tube towards the sun, throw the rest of that shit away, and voila! Hundreds of billions of neutrinos will be coming out the end of it every second, for you to do with as you please!
No moron, that is not how science works. They released these results so that their peers can independently analyze them. Many eyeballs makes all bugs shallow is the way science has worked for hundreds of years its nothing new. The media are to blame for the circus by delving into the middle of a process that they do not understand or care to.
If you do not want to read media hype, don't. Go to the source, get some data and send them an email suggesting they had a loose fiber optic cable.
IANAP. Why would neutrinos that travel faster then light travel linearly? I understand why they should, but if they violate causality why would they end up where you expect them?
They come in the dark, only in the darkest.
Only on Slashdot do you find scientists reading forums from their labs at 1AM on Saturday mornings while waiting for experiments to finish up.
*Looks over at refluxing reaction vessel*
Dammit.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
You know how I know you don't know what their original paper said or how people associated with CERN work? Because you seem to think they took one measurement with uncalibrated instruments and then ran to the presses to publish "zomg, ftl neutrinos!" For crying out loud, do you actually think they would have originally made an announcement like this if there weren't a considerable number of standard deviations between expectation and result?
This recurring trope of "Armchair quarterback posits that people who have spent their entire adult lives studying X made a mistake because they missed some obvious thing the quarterback noticed after 15 seconds of thinking about X" really baffles me. One would think the (ostensibly) smart and educated inhabitants of slashdot would know better.
Actually Cern did not claim it. It said that it had found some results that it could not account for yet. At no point did cern go "We have found FTL neutrinos".
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
If they're effectively communicating to you that they feel the result is 'too good to be true', then you really don't have a lot to really complain about, do you?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Get your shit together. This is sounding more and more like a fly by night operation every day.
Quoting ArcherB:
> "I should also add that I will be conducting
> my own experiments in my basement with a neutrino cannon,
> flashlight and stop watch. If I see anything interesting,
> I'll post the results here."
Actually, if you get any results, please put them in the first post so everyone can see them.
I have to say that these CERN guys really screwed up. First they claim that they have checked everything. They ask for help to solve the riddle. Then they find out there is a frigging cable loose, but at the same time say that another error will probably compensate for it. As an experimental physicist I must say that I am a bit shocked by the way this is going. There are experts in the world on clock synchronisation. 60 ns absolute timing accuracy is not a lot. People in the atomic clock business do a lot better. How can these cern people have screwed this up?
The original article is way, way misleading. It makes it sound like the people in CERN are to blame. However, CERN is just the source of the neutrinos. The detectors in the other end is the Gran Sasso lab in Italy. The whole shebang is called the OPERA experiment.
Now, the problem(s) were found in the Gran Sasso side. For a slightly more accurate reporting, see http://profmattstrassler.com/2012/02/24/finally-an-opera-plot-that-makes-some-sense/, especially the first comment.
This is how science is done though. It's not all "Theory -> Test -> Proof!" It's often just like this... messy, details, flaws, re-testing, often in cycles.
If we could get a OUNCE of this type of thinking applied to religion, God wouldn't stand a chance.
Poor quality assurance indeed.
Quoting ArcherB:
> "I should also add that I will be conducting
> my own experiments in my basement with a neutrino cannon,
> flashlight and stop watch. If I see anything interesting,
> I'll post the results here."
Actually, if you get any results, please put them in the first post so everyone can see them.
If I get any interesting results, I'll post them yesterday.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I, for one, was rooting for FTL. And I thought they'd have a more interesting gravity well or frame of reference mistake.
A loose cable? It's like they've got some out of work audio techs doing their setup.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
You're not going to get nice shards out of that one.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I bet their networking engineers are frantically trying to distance themselves from such a basic mistake.
"It's the cleaning lady! She must have bumped into it!"
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
A rational government would take the money collected in the churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples and give it to the universities.
That's what your parent was saying...
Also, you don't actually need the flashlight to conduct the experiment, give it back to me please
"This result is probably wrong" != "fertilize your lawn with motor oil"
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
My car fires neutrinos out the back of the engine to pick up momentum and go down the street. The neighbors were making fun of it recently saying my car only uses weak interactions. I said quit pissing me off or you might get a faster-than-light whack in the head while asleep in your house at night.
As Albert Einstein (I faked my death and have been hiding in Venezuela because the Illuminati and Scientologists are both after me, for differing reasons of course) I have to say I admire their pluck. I didn't ever say that it wasn't possible for masses to travel faster than light. I said it was impossible for things of zero or greater mass to travel faster than the speed of light. There is plenty of room in the equations for things with negative or imaginary mass to move at any speed. They're on a good track and I would wish them luck - if I believed in luck. Anyway, Godspeed to them (pun intended).
John Titor is here and he has some questions about APL, but he's been into the Yukon Jack and I can't quite make out his question. Something about translations of a 6D matrix. Maybe next time, if there is one - he's fallen backwards into the pool now and may or may not drown, which opens up some interesting Heisenberg questions as he's just a teen and not been on his journey yet. I'm sure that will sort itself out in time (hint, hint).
Your online girlfriend says "hi baybee" and wants to know if you've forwarded the funds from her eBay sales and that wire transfer. Apparently she could use the money because times are getting a little tough in (Estonia? Chengdu? Lagos?) Darn, I can't make that out either but hey - her Roofies and my Viagra are kicking in so I gotta go.
Until next time,
Al
How many gratuitous errors and claimed impossibilities do you generally consider acceptable in your version of science?
The problem is that we have one peephole and one organization looking through it and crying wolf. Under normal scientific circumstances, if you say something preposterous, I go spend my $20 replicating your experiment and prove you're a fool. But when your instrument costs us billions dollars and you use it to make absurd, demonstrably insane claims, only to admit you're working the instrument wrong—and you do this repeatedly—you make us all look like fools for spending the money on you. Which is a shame, because the world would be a better place with more research.
what now?
convert everyone into bunch of these particles
travel faster than light
convert particles back to everyone
what all we are going to do after finding this particle, can also be done now, like a thought experiment..
While not belittling CERN's accomplishments nor their professionalism, it is a little annoying to let the press pump out another headline talking about 'hope' while they are still dealing with potential errors in their experimental setup. It ranks up there with the "New Cures for AIDS" postings on r/Science, where a new cure is apparently found every week -> it becomes tabloid material.
The standard protocol remains the same -> fix the broken equipment, run the experiment, check results, run the experiment again, check the results again, call some of your friends somewhere else & have them run the experiment a few times, compare results, call another friend, run the experiment again, compare results...and so on, at least a dozen or so times...then, very cautiously, inform the scientific community that you are intending to put out a paper regarding said results, and have your editor & interested parties review an advance copy to try and find any errors, then publish & batten down the hatches. The general idea being that someone, somewhere will have properly functioning equipment, and they will spot the error before removing it (at a later time) becomes a political problem. Once it makes it into the science textbooks, it becomes almost impossible to remove, and what more, a lot of people will be operating with the incorrect information.
So, CERN should fix the equipment (upgrade if they can), check their results, do the rest of the above, then call in the reporters to state whether or not we need to worry about rewriting the known laws of physics.
I am John Hurt.
Uh, new science stopped costing "$20" a long time ago.
No one is debating that. The original press release said that they were checking results elsewhere to ensure that they were correct. Broken / miscalibrated equipment is the bane of every scientist, and with-holding of results until after several of your friends confirm things is always a good idea (it helps prevent publications of perpetual motion machines and what not).
I am John Hurt.
First of all, they're not making "demonstrably insane claims". They published the data they collected during experiments and are looking for explanation - which might be "experimental error". Discarding anything as "demonstrably insane" before you investigate the reasons for data you got is just the other side of accepting anything you hear as true without investigation. Sadly, latter is modus operandi for modern journalism, which is why this all got blown out of proportion.
Second, you sound like you personally invested in development of FTL engine at CERN and now found out it was a fraud.
OPERA was looking for tau neutrinos and found them, AFAIK, and FTL neutrino sighting was just a strange data point they will now try and reproduce to shut this case.
Mr. Relativistic Physics appears to be having an affair with Ms. Soap Opera. Therefore, please don't be surprised by any outcome.
*shrugs* It may be possible to travel faster than light. However, we do tend to have a good idea how fast various known particles DO travel. There may be unknown particles that do travel faster than light, and / or other methods that allow normal matter to traverse space / time much faster than what is currently considered feasible.
However, CERN wasn't, to our knowledge, using wormholes or exotic matter or what not that particular day (Thursdays are wormhole days, Fridays are black-hole days, Saturdays are the day that they perform tune-ups on the chips they implanted in the EU politicians' brains, Sundays are tapioca pudding days), so no one is taking the experimental results too seriously.
I am John Hurt.
Agreed. I mean, what self-respecting super-villain doesn't have a particle collider of their own? The ones having trouble coming up with this month's rent, that's who.
I am John Hurt.
It's been a while, and I'm too lazy to fully read Wikipedia, but I want to say from the decomposition of neutrons. Neutron decay = 1 electron, 1 proton, & 1 neutrino.
Though I may be wrong.
Wait, checked it. Close, the above is Beta negative decay, so it emits an anti-neutrino. So, you want Beta positive for a regular (electron) neutrino.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_decay
I am John Hurt.
Uhm, I would read the post as
"since we made a lot of mistake, we did not measure anything. then, we cannot exclude neutrinos are faster than light, exactly as if we did not do the experiment!"
Suppose, for the sake of argument (I know the chances are between slim and none, I suspect that the speed limit on the universe is to prevent game-breaking exploits of the universe itself) that FTL neutrinos are possible. How fast do they need to travel before you can send messages to the past?
A rational government would not confiscate the assets of private institutions unduly.
So Henry VIII was the only rational governor in the history of the world?
.. Who you should stop taking seriously is journalists writing nonsense about things they do not understand.
Well, if that only stop the all knowing journalists. I just wonder the purpose of them apart for mild amusement.
Oh electron sponge, why do you have to be so negative about it? :p
Trust those who find errors in their own processes and report them openly. Do not trust those who hide errors, or don't even find them in the first place. Everybody makes errors.
How many gratuitous errors and claimed impossibilities do you generally consider acceptable in your version of science?
All of them, at least in a provisional sense. The provision being that each is promptly acknowledged as an error as soon as it becomes known that it was an error. Science progresses through the discovery of inconsistency or inaccuracy in existing explanations, and this means there will be occasional false positive. Science is not a fixed body of dogma independent of truth (that would describe most religions).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Mr. Relativistic Physics appears to be having an affair with Ms. Soap Opera. Therefore, please don't be surprised by any outcome.
An interocitor will take care of both of them. Probably with a surprising outcome.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
If you read the original paper, you'll find that they did NOT claim the "too good to be true" result. It was reported that way by a lot of press agents, but the original source basically says "we think there's a systematic error at work we haven't identified. Can you see the problem?" Do not blame CERN for the way the press misrepresented them.
I worked at CERN for six months doing my M.Sc. (in 2000, on ATLAS, not OPERA which is the experiment reporting the result.) Having seen the actual systems and the level of complexity and sensitivity involved, I think assembling them with two small errors identified this quickly is actually pretty damned impressive. Most tech companies dream of CERN's quality control.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
My understanding, based on talking to clock people who were brought to CERN after publication, is that there was no clock person on the original paper. They had access to some clock people at CERN, who helped set up the GPS measurements, but no clock person invested in the results.
If so, then CERN / OPERA does deserve the bad press they are getting. They should have brought in some experts prior to publication.
Absolute clock synchronization at the nanosecond level is notoriously tricky. (I have professional experience here.) It seems like mere bookkeeping, but there is typically (as in this case) no direct way to check whether or not you have gotten it right. It is also confused with clock syntonization (finding the rate difference between clocks), which is easier and is what most "clock sync" is actually used for. (Clock syntonization is easier as you can calculate the expected clock rate differences as a check, and also as many clock sync errors don't have significant long-term rates.)
I once had to help an assemble a 1980's video conference suite based on ISDN for a pre-booked conference. It was almost steampunk with a varnished wood one piece desk and cabinet for the monitor and camera. We managed to get the audio working then the engineers at the other end gave instructions on how to get the video working. Then the people who booked the meeting decided they would just travel down by train instead.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
But I'm not going to throw it away just yet . . .
The glass is half glass.
Tell me about it. I'm sufficiently educated on some reoccurring topics to recognize that *most* of the discussion in those topics is based on this type of uselessly critical speculation. I basically entertain comments on science stories (particularly energy) to watch the train wreck of a discussion that ensues. I'm probably just an addict. The Slashdot's comment code: "I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I'm going to run my mouth anyway because I know these things about other stuff and people told me I'm smart. When challenged, I will spend unreasonable effort to defend my absurd ideas and double-down on useless criticism against any new information presented"
Sorry, CERN, but you need to pick up the workmanship before you can be taken seriously.
OPERA isn't a CERN project. CERN sent OPERA the neutrinos, but the detector and timing hardware is OPERA's responsibility. I don't know why CERN stepped in to issue a press release about errors in the results OPERA announced. (Maybe they wanted to dissociate themselves from the FTL claims that were being indirectly attributed to CERN?) More here.
If those neutrinos are really faster than light, then either General Relativity or the Maxwell Equations are wrong. What now depends on what exactly is wrong, but could include time machines, perpetual motors, or maybe nothing important.
Rethinking email
You could argue that expected information per dollar spent is poor. I wont however.
Suppose, for the sake of argument (I know the chances are between slim and none, I suspect that the speed limit on the universe is to prevent game-breaking exploits of the universe itself) that FTL neutrinos are possible. How fast do they need to travel before you can send messages to the past?
One of the interesting things to come out of this is that you can have bi-metric theories with superluminal motion and not have causality violations (time travel) or tachyons. Basically, these things happen because you are Lorentz transforming something going faster than light. In a bimetric theory, there are actually two conversions between time and distance (i.e., "light" speeds, although light itself only goes at one of them). Matter is sensitive to one metric, the matter metric (thereby avoiding violations of the weak equivalence principle, or WEP, which is tightly constrained for normal matter), while gravitational waves follow the other, gravity metric. It turns out that there are no good WEP limits for neutrinos. so you could imagine neutrino's following the other, gravity, metric. Thus, they get superluminal motion, but without the complications.
So, to answer your question, it may be that no matter how fast they are, you can't send anything into the past.
I guess science works more like: Oh shit, every experiment we've ever done has been affected by not one, but TWO incorrect setups. Fuck it.. our research must be fine.
I'm just a layperson that has an interest in physics and relativity, but what if photons travel slower than neutrinos? There's nothing magical or about photons and relativity doesn't require that they travel at the universal speed limit, does it? I mean they travel 90 km/s slower through air than a vacuum and 180,000 km/s slower through glass. What would happen if you just use neutrino speed instead of light speed for c? Is some of the problem that we have so ingrained in our heads that the "speed of light" is the maximum that we jump to time travel before thinking that there may be something that can travel 1/1000th faster?
Are there any experiments whose results can only be explained by light being the fastest thing in the universe?
There is a glimmer of hope for interesting new physics.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
What impossibility did anyone involved in the experiment ever claim?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
That is one problem with having basically one of the most expensive scientific instruments in the world: Who do you call to replicate your results? As far as I can tell, CERN basically had to throw a wide net in an attempt to find anyone who somehow had the capability of replicating the experiment, or help with the current one.
The ______ Agenda
> ...then call in the reporters...
So they should keep their activities secret untill they are certain of their results and then publish, just to protect the reporters from making asses of themselves? Bullshit.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Is there any place better than wikipedia to get info about the experiment? They seem to use signals from GPS satellites to synchronize the creation and detection events, but I wonder why? They could synchronize two clocks and drive one from CERN to the detector. There would be some drift due to mostly kinematic effects, but probably only a few nanoseconds. Maybe you could synchronize them 1/2 way between and drive them to their destinations... In any case they could be brought back to the same location and the drift could be analyzed as well.
> I don't know why CERN stepped in to issue a press release...
Because CERN handled the timing at their end and that seems to be where these problems occurred. It was a joint experiment.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I love how the idea that anything running counter to the concepts of mass / length / time dilation happening at high speeds with relative simultaneity is considered insane. Oh, that's demonstrably insane, but Heisenberg and light-speed limitations on information transmittal, THOSE are the new rational. And that's not even getting into quantum effects.
I don't mean to pick on the science behind any of that. But Science long ago left the realm of anything that could be considered judgable based upon common sense. Any normal person from 300 years ago would consider science off its rocker, except for the fact that it's provably true (at least, the provably true parts are). We're firmly in a world where proof and experiments are more important.
Also considering the dead end we've had with strings, it's about time for a major sub-quantum theoretical shakeup.
The ______ Agenda
Hey Al, I think your hideout may have been compromised, you'd better check your surroundings for neural disruption devices. Or maybe the viagra is just draining too much blood from your brain. What you actually said was that it is impossible for objects with positive mass to be *accelerated* to the speed of light, nothing was said about normal-mass objects traveling at FTL speeds.
And actually I seem to remember a recent analysis suggesting that superluminal objects would also require an infinite amount of energy to *decelerate* to lightspeed, so it's possible that there may also be some way to "jump the fence" and reach FTL speeds using a finite amount of energy. Perhaps by somehow briefly "borrowing" the energy to reach lightspeed and immediately paying it back as you pass it by. Yeah, I don't know quite how that would work, but I'm sure a genius of your magnitude can sort it out easily enough.
We'll figure this out sooner or later.....
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Actually doing one experiment was exactly what happened - only Opera saw any FTL neutrinos, no other experiment corroborated this. In addition Opera received considerable criticism for NOT being sceptical enough and by no means was their paper written in any sort of cautionary tone. If it had it would have claimed an unexplained timing discrepancy not FTL neutrinos which is what it DID claim.
In their defence it is an extremely hard experiment to do so mistakes are inevitable and I would not blame them for that. However, knowing this, they should take the blame for publishing far too early for such amazing claims. That being said I would rather have one daft result like this every 5-10 years than to restrict experiment's abilities to publish as they see fit and risk missing an important result.
CERN did not claim this but the Opera experiment did. They even calculated the neutrino speed in their paper.
I thought nothing travels faster than light? Faster then Light
AccountKiller
60 ns is not hard for two clocks a few metres apart. Put those clocks 700km apart AND underground where you cannot directly received GPS and things get a lot harder! For a start you need to know exactly how far apart the clocks are because a discrepancy of 30cm means a 1ns difference in propagation delay for a signal.
Just reverse the tachyon field on your deflector array, and then inject a stream of polarons into the positronic matrix.
Jeez, do I have to do everything around here?
Haven't you noticed that whenever the ship is about to have a core breach, you are the only person in your entire engineering team who does anything? So, yes, it is up to you to clean up the mess left by the two scientists who the Federation sent to completely redesign warp drives.
But maybe the annoying genius kid will have a science project you can use or something.
I believe what he was saying is a figure of speech. As most other types of science today can be done at multiple locations even if the price tag is a lot higher then a mere $20. While anything out of CERN cannot be independently verified so it doesn't matter if their project costs $20 billion dollars, or $1, if it cannot be done in controlled conditions somewhere else it fails the ability to have a peer evaluation with independent testing procedures.
Neat. And for our purposes, this would allow for gigantic civilizations spread across light years linked by high speed communication systems? If you could only transmit information and energy this way, it would still be almost as useful as being able to send matter..
If they know the reporters are going to obviously blow things out of proportion? Yes.
....since the last post on this - check the comment stream on the last slashdot update. As I said there: "It's more than a rumour, as this later report from Nature makes clear. There is an OPERA statement circulating today that suggests two potential problems with the set-up. One is the one reported here - the cable issue - the second is a problem with "the experiment’s pioneering use of Global Positioning System (GPS) signals to synchronize atomic clocks at each end of its neutrino beam". But you're right - they haven't made a public statement yet nor been able to quantify yet the contribution of each to the potential error. It doesn't look good for them though." Here's the Nature story from three days ago. It explains there were two sources of error, and that "These two issues can modify the neutrino time of flight in opposite directions". The story posted by ScienceInsider seems in-fact to have been wide of the mark - it stated that the cable issue alone could account for the 60 nanosecond effect. OPERA have yet to confirm that - and as the new post above says - the other error could push things the other way. But it doesn't look good for those FTL neutrinos. So in short, I guess I should have slashdotted the Nature story instead of making a community contribution to a post that got the story er... wrong by being just plain too quick off the mark. Doh. Oh yeah and quit blaming 'the press'. I saw lots of accurate coverage - not just by Nature and Science but by the Guardian and the BBC. All stories stated the results were incredibly unlikely to hold and explained why. But you expect journalists not to report on a paper that was posted to arXiv - thus in the public domain - and suggested that Einstein's special theory of relativity might have been broken? Let's get real.
So if they make any big discoveries, I guess they'll have to make another Large Hadron Collider to confirm...
What's the harm? It upsets your fragile emotions?
This is what the scientific process pretty much requires. The ability to duplicate the experiment using equipment/people who were not there the first time.
I'm not standing on anyone's shoulders! I'm pulling myself up by my own bootstraps!!
No, but he unwittingly placed Europe on the path of modernism by settling the power struggle between Church and State (at least in England). Everyone in that era had divided loyalties between their local secular leader and the Pope. There was a constant struggle between secular powers and the Catholic church, such as the conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII. Henry VIII was the first monarch to break the power of the Catholic church in his country by establishing himself as the leader of both the secular government and the Church of England. Fortunately, he was not just power mad, he was also a humanist intellectual, and he also kept the hierarchy of the Church of England in check. Over time, his actions spurred on the other secular powers to assert themselves to a greater degree. Of course, he wasn't the only one working to curb the Catholic Church. Martin Luther, Calvin, and their followers were critically important. As well as the leadership of the Italian city states in the Renaissance.
The dominance of secular power over religious power paved the way for the Scientific revolution, the Age of Reason, and the modern world. Compare the number of scientific and technological advancements made by nations where secular government isn't controlled by a religious hierarchy with the number in nations where it is. The difference is astounding. Religious dogma suffocates scientific and technological advancement.
It's not undue. A rational government realizes the inherent threat that organized religions pose. It can either abolish religion or it can deprive it of resources while using it to control society.
Don't go down that road of hero worship. There are many scientists who do things out of good will; others have an explorer mindset; and then there are those who are driven by ego and a desire to leave a legacy. Read up on Kim Ung-yong, the man with the highest IQ in the world, and how NASA scientists basically exploited him between the age of 8 to 18. The poor guy left disillusioned and bitter. Scientists are human and are subject to the same base desires, flaws, and fears.
Standard deviation of the measurement does not imply accuracy. Systematic errors cause erroneous results without contributing to standard deviation.
so, if the foton got there first they wouldnt have noticed the cable was loose because everything would have fit the bill ?
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
If everything 'fit the bill', then the cable probably wasn't loose.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
they definitely wouldnt have checked it ... i'm kinda looking forward to the re-testing, anything that shakes the world upside down without explosions is a good thing. I might (i am in fact) be very much out of my league since i'm a total physics noob but i dont see why these results have to imply that einsteins theories would be flawed, incomplete at most since all of the formulas require an absolute vacuum which doesnt exist here (or anywhere as far as i understand it) with no ... i lack the proper words quantum friction? quantum rubble? it might still just have something to do with the environment and the way the neutrinos just go through everything where photons don't (but let me repeat, i'm a total noob or layman as they say, just very much interested in all the wonders this place has to offer)
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
Second, you sound like you personally invested in development of FTL engine at CERN and now found out it was a fraud.
CERN is spending money that governments could use to finance other research projects, so yes, I can understand that he feels personally invested.
First it was the magnets, then it was a bird dropping bread on a transformer, now it's something else about the equipment ... while billions of € are pouring in. Maybe it's time the fine scientists at CERN fire somebody in management ?
Well, at least they've proved that their work is so riddled with errors that no one will trust it.
Tgus us a catastrophe.
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make install -not war
I thought that matter is gravity waves, so there can be only one metric for both.
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make install -not war
One thing I remember very clearly from my college physics course was an explanation of how going faster than the speed of light leads to causality violations. I suppose it's possible that causality isn't something we "need" but it's going to be very hard to have a sensible concept of physics if "A causes B" has to be thrown out the window. I find the probability that ONE instrument doing ONE experiment that shows that maybe something went faster than light a lot less likely to be true than "A causes B" being true and that ONE experiment simply being bad.
I quite agree with you about strings, but FTL is completely insane.
I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope maybe CERN can pull it off again. If I myself weren't broke, I'd donate all the money I could to those guys just to see an FTL Drive in my lifetime.
In addition Opera received considerable criticism for NOT being sceptical enough and by no means was their paper written in any sort of cautionary tone. If it had it would have claimed an unexplained timing discrepancy not FTL neutrinos which is what it DID claim.
DIDN'T
In conclusion, despite the large significance of the measurement reported here and the robustness of the analysis, the potentially great impact of the result motivates the continuation of our studies in order to investigate possible still unknown systematic effects that could explain the observed anomaly. We deliberately do not attempt any theoretical or phenomenological interpretation of the results.
Well then, let's do something about that. Everyone, we're going to begin passing around a hat to put money in. All those in favor of building a clone / copy of whatever CERN is currently sporting for the simple reason of being able to check their figures, put something in. All those who are not in favor of building a clone / copy of whatever CERN is currently sporting, do not place anything in (or take anything out, we're watching :-) ).
Next we can vote on where to place it. Right next to CERN, with a banner that says "Ours is slightly bigger!" or some other country that is currently considered popular enough to host it. Hell, if we're really desperate, we can probably save some money by reusing that infrastructure in Texas that was halfway built for some other super-collider. Or we could build it in Japan / China (potential reuse in the near future as an optional weapon for Gundam).
And how the hell does Firefox have every possible spelling combination for "super-collider" except the right one?
I am John Hurt.
An early arrival time of CNGS muon neutrinos with respect to the one computed assuming the speed of light in vacuum of (57.8 ± 7.8 (stat.) (sys.)) ns was measured. This anomaly corresponds to a relative difference of the muon neutrino velocity with respect to the speed of light (v-c)/c = (2.37 ± 0.32 (stat.) (sys.)) ×10^-5. The above result....
Perhaps English is not your first language but as a native English speaker let me assure you that there is absolutely no wiggle room given the above statement. The only meaning is that they are claiming faster than light neutrinos. There is no mention of this being due to some unknown systematic. The reference to "anomaly" is physics-speak for something other than what is expected, not that they are uncertain that their result is correct.