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New Paper Claims Neutrino Is Likely a Faster-Than-Light Particle
HughPickens.com writes Phys.org reports that in a new paper accepted by the journal Astroparticle Physics, Robert Ehrlich, a recently retired physicist from George Mason University, claims that the neutrino is very likely a tachyon or faster-than-light particle. Ehrlich's new claim of faster-than-light neutrinos is based on a much more sensitive method than measuring their speed, namely by finding their mass. The result relies on tachyons having an imaginary mass, or a negative mass squared. Imaginary mass particles have the weird property that they speed up as they lose energy – the value of their imaginary mass being defined by the rate at which this occurs. According to Ehrlich, the magnitude of the neutrino's imaginary mass is 0.33 electronvolts, or 2/3 of a millionth that of an electron. He deduces this value by showing that six different observations from cosmic rays, cosmology, and particle physics all yield this same value within their margin of error. One check on Ehrlich's claim could come from the experiment known as KATRIN, which should start taking data in 2015. In this experiment the mass of the neutrino could be revealed by looking at the shape of the spectrum in the beta decay of tritium, the heaviest isotope of hydrogen.
But be careful. There have been many such claims, the last being in 2011 when the "OPERA" experiment measured the speed of neutrinos and claimed they travelled a tiny amount faster than light. When their speed was measured again the original result was found to be in error – the result of a loose cable no less. "Before you try designing a "tachyon telephone" to send messages back in time to your earlier self it might be prudent to see if Ehrlich's claim is corroborated by others."
But be careful. There have been many such claims, the last being in 2011 when the "OPERA" experiment measured the speed of neutrinos and claimed they travelled a tiny amount faster than light. When their speed was measured again the original result was found to be in error – the result of a loose cable no less. "Before you try designing a "tachyon telephone" to send messages back in time to your earlier self it might be prudent to see if Ehrlich's claim is corroborated by others."
Me too. I read it one week before it was published, and posted my comments last month. As I said tomorrow, there's no reason I can see that neutrinos aren't tachyons. In fact Prof. Robert Ehrlich agreed with me yesterday, after he accepted his Nobel prize for non-casual phenomena next year.
You cheated using tachyons.
Since they travel back in time, you have to test the result before you do the experiment.
If your test was successful, you see little reason to do the experiment, which causes the test result to not have happened -- which can make your co-workers quite angry with you. The frustrating nature of this type of work requires extreme dedication.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Nor did the Opera team claim any such thing, they observed faster than light tachyons, couldn't find why they had got those results and contacted another team to ensure their equipment was faulty. People in those positions don't just make wild speculations with corroborated evidence.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2804
Six observations based on data and fits to data from a variety of areas are consistent with the hypothesis that the electron neutrino is a m^2_v_e = 0.11±0.016eV 2 tachyon. The data are from areas including CMB fluctuations, gravitational lensing, cosmic ray spectra, neutrino oscillations, and 0v double beta decay. For each of the six observations it is possible under explicitly stated assumptions to compute a value for m^2_v_e , and it is found that the six values are remarkably consistent with the above cited _e mass (\Chi^2 = 2.73). There are no known observations in clear conflict with the claimed result. Three checks are proposed to test the validity of the claim, one of which could be performed using existing data.
Ummm...according to my calculator, 0.33 eV / 510998 eV = 0.646 x 10^-6, which is reasonably close to "two thirds of a millionth" quote
As for the imaginary mass, let's say that some particle had 0.33i eV as its mass. Then if you squared that, you would end up with -0.108 eV^2. How is that not "negative mass squared" ?
There are lots of potential problems with Erlich's theory, but the ideas you chose to nitpick are not at issue..
Imaginary isn't "negative mass squared"
The sentence is slightly ambiguous, however;
The result relies on tachyons having ... a negative (mass squared)
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Any positive mass, you mean. Imaginary numbers aren't positive.
You just need a thiotimoline target in your detector.
Well, since Professsor Coward has spoken, I guess all science should stop, our understanding of the universe obviously being entirely complete.
drdread66 doesn't have it backwards, the original article is unclear in its phrasing. It should have stated that the square of the mass is negative, which can be assumed when it accurately states that the mass is an imaginary number. Another commenter has linked back to the original paper on archiv.org; I always recommend going back to the source for science reporting anywhere online. As Einstein said when asked about his thoughts on a one page summary of the theory of relativity from a local paper, "things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
Star trek didn't invent tachyons or the idea of them.
Two things:
1) Causality isn't necessarily a law of nature, so much as "the way our senses are wired to see things".
2) It is unlikely that tachyons have brakes. Cars have brakes, even bicycles have brakes. But probably not tachyons.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
A telephone to send messages back in time... but sending information back wouldn't change the time we are in now, it would simply cause a split, an alternate time line to occur, and nothing would change at the time we are in now.
Example: Sending information back to stop the assassination of Kennedy wouldn't change that fact in our time, its already occurred.
It would create a new time line, one of which we are unaware.
If multiple Universe, and multiple time lines exist, would changing a time line we could have no knowledge of be meaningful in any way?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
it can't break the speed limit of light
I would say that you misread Einstein, Dr. Powell. May I call you Mark? You see Mark, what Einstein actually said was that nothing can accelerate to the speed of light because its mass would become infinite. Einstein said nothing about entities already traveling at the speed of light or faster.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
But if it were moving, you'd want to brake it, in case something breaks.
In that supernova (the first observed in 1987 hence the name), the supernova was close enough that we were actually able to detect the neutrinos from it. The neutrinos arrived about three hours before the light from the supernova. But that's not evidence for faster than light neutrinos, since one actually expects this to happen. In the standard way of viewing things, the neutrinos move very very close to the speed of light, but during a core-collapse supernova like SN 1987A, the neutrinos are produced in the core at the beginning of the process. They then flee the star without interacting with the matter, whereas the light produced in the core is slowed down by all the matter in the way, so the neutrinos get a few hours head start.
The problem for FTL neutrinos is that if the neutrions were even a tiny bit faster than the speed of light they should have arrived much much earlier. This is strong evidence against FTL neutrinos. In the paper in question, he mentions SN 1987A in the context of testing his hypothesis in an alternate way using a supernova and the exact distribution of the neutrinos from one but doesn't discuss anywhere I can see the more basic issue of the neutrinos arriving at close to the same time as the light.
Saying "has a negative mass squared" can be misinterpreted more easily than "the square of the mass is negative." One person read it as intended, and another read it as "you take a negative mass and square it." If the wording was completely clear, that misinterpretation couldn't have happened. Different brains will associate the words "negative mass" as a complete unit while others will associate "mass squared" as a complete unit.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
Could tachyons be where the dark matter mass comes from?
There is no way to validly misinterpret "has a negative mass squared" and then you proceed to misinterpret it?
"The square of a negative mass" is a positive number. The square of an imaginary mass is negative, which is what they are talking about. It is clearly possible to misinterpret this. Before someone cries out that an imaginary mass is nonsense, I should point out that imaginary numbers appear in several legitimate places in science. I don't believe the results of this paper are correct, but I'm not about to dismiss them out of hand.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
Did any of you who moderated parent up actually look at the link posted? It's a personal website defending his pet crackpot theory of everything.
Actually, "mass squared" is a completely relevant concept in this context. The reason is that the equation everybody thinks they know as Einstein's special relativity equation is NOT E = mc^2. That is the simplified version for objects at rest. The version that includes particles in motion is E^2 = p^2c^2 + m^2c^4, where p is the momentum of the particle. Note the presence of an m^2 term in that equation. Thus, a negative mass squared -- which others have pointed out should be read as "negative (mass squared)" -- implies that the particle's energy is *decreased* by its mass rather than increased by it. This is a counterintuitive idea, but quite plausible mathematically.
One thing that I should point out is that it is possible that Erlich wrote this paper not because he actually believes it, but because he did the math. Got a surprising result that did not obviously contradict known principles of experiments, and is challenging the world to tell him where he went wrong. We used to do this all the time when I was in grad school. It was a lot of fun. The main difference is that when you stake out an outrageous position and your friends catch your mistake over some beer, no one calls you an idiot on Slashdot. When you publish a paper, the results can be less ... um .. . "civil."
In particle physics, a massless particle is a particle whose invariant mass is theoretically zero. Currently, the only known massless particles are gauge bosons, the photon (carrier of electromagnetism) and the gluon (carrier of the strong force).
The belief is that Neutrinos have mass. However, if they don't then, they are a W boson and can qualify.