CERN scientists 'break the speed of light'

[The Vegan Marxist]

If confirmed, the scientific implications to this are staggering!

CERN scientists 'break the speed of light'
September 22, 2011

Scientists said on Thursday they recorded particles travelling faster than light - a finding that could overturn one of Einstein's fundamental laws of the universe.

Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.

"We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."

If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

That assertion, which has withstood over a century of testing, is one of the key elements of the so-called Standard Model of physics, which attempts to describe the way the universe and everything in it works.

The totally unexpected finding emerged from research by a physicists working on an experiment dubbed OPERA run jointly by the CERN particle research centre near Geneva and the Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy.

A total of 15,000 beams of neutrinos - tiny particles that pervade the cosmos - were fired over a period of three years from CERN towards Gran Sasso 730 (500 miles) km away, where they were picked up by giant detectors.

Light would have covered the distance in around 2.4 thousandths of a second, but the neutrinos took 60 nanoseconds - or 60 billionths of a second - less than light beams would have taken.

"It is a tiny difference," said Ereditato, who also works at Berne University in Switzerland, "but conceptually it is incredibly important. The finding is so startling that, for the moment, everybody should be very prudent."

Ereditato declined to speculate on what it might mean if other physicists, who will be officially informed of the discovery at a meeting in CERN on Friday, found that OPERA's measurements were correct.

"I just don't want to think of the implications," he said. "We are scientists and work with what we know."

Much science-fiction literature is based on the idea that, if the light-speed barrier can be overcome, time travel might theoretically become possible.

The existence of the neutrino, an elementary sub-atomic particle with a tiny amount of mass created in radioactive decay or in nuclear reactions such as those in the Sun, was first confirmed in 1934, but it still mystifies researchers.

It can pass through most matter undetected, even over long distances, and without being affected. Millions pass through the human body every day, scientists say.

To reach Gran Sasso, the neutrinos pushed out from a special installation at CERN - also home to the Large Hadron Collider probing the origins of the universe - have to pass through water, air and rock.

The underground Italian laboratory, some 120 km (75 miles) to the south of Rome, is the largest of its type in the world for particle physics and cosmic research.

Around 750 scientists from 22 different countries work there, attracted by the possibility of staging experiments in its three massive halls, protected from cosmic rays by some 1,400 metres (4,200 feet) of rock overhead.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8782895/CERN-scientists-break-the-speed-of-light.html

[StoneFrog]

WoW just WOW!

[Smyg]

Say whaaat.

[socialistjustin]

Star Trek might actually exist now! Awesome.

[ВАЛТЕР]

WOW!!! WHAT A GREAT STEP FORWARD FOR HUMANITY!!:thumbup1:

That is of course if we don't turn this new found knowledge into a new weapon...:(

[Nox]

I'm a bit skeptical.

[StoneFrog]

I think the most skeptical are the researchers, sounds like they nearly had a heart attack after seeing the readings.

[Yuppie Grinder]

rad

[Nox]

I think the most skeptical are the researchers, sounds like they nearly had a heart attack after seeing the readings.

It just doesn't seem right...

It really sounds too good to be true.

[Rusty Shackleford]

if mass can go beyond the speed of light then... well... YEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

[The Vegan Marxist]

qJPV31tu24E

[Commissar Rykov]

I think my mind just almost literally exploded. If this is confirmed this is an epic breakthrough.:drool:

[Le Rouge]

:ohmy: Goodbye Einstein. :)

[Rss]

This is nice and all, but does this sciency stuff make neat guns?

[La Comédie Noire]

What I like the most is how cautious the scientists are being, asking for independent confirmation and refusing to speculate on possibilities.

:)

[The Vegan Marxist]

This is nice and all, but does this sciency stuff make neat guns?

Thankfully no.

[Revolutionair]

I think this will be used as a new advancement in weapons of mass destruction.

[Rusty Shackleford]

This is nice and all, but does this sciency stuff make neat guns?
so long as war is profitable then making fancy science guns will continue.

[Klaatu]

There is good reason to refrain from a certainty that we can make flawless assertions. Healthy doubt and debate are the stuff of good science.

[Misanthrope]

This could possibly change physics forever!

[Bright Banana Beard]

This can make theory of relative a bit wrong if this is true.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

Best news I have heard in a long time! :cool:

[Misanthrope]

Best news I have heard in a long time! :cool:

Science news is a nice relief from politics eh?:)

[Summerspeaker]

It's probably a measurement or calculation error. We'll see.

[Veovis]

This is nice and all, but does this sciency stuff make neat guns?

Not unless you really want a nuke that detonates before you arm it.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

Science news is a nice relief from politics eh?:)

Very, I hope it isn't a calculation mistake because the potential for this is grand.

[Q]

Star Trek might actually exist now! Awesome.

Actually, ships in Star Trek don't travel faster than light, they "merely" bend space-time. Hence the name "warp drive". This concept has been theoretically/mathematically underpinned in recent years in the Alcubierre Drive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive), but would require insane amounts of energy to work.

But yeah, this is quite an interesting discovery. Although, weren't neutrinos weightless? This could explain their capability to travel faster than light.

[Gustav HK]

This is nice and all, but does this sciency stuff make neat guns?

For the people, who are still alive.

BTW shouldn´t such a particle be recieved in point B before it was sent out from point A? On the other hand, if this is true, there would be a need to revise the theories of relativity, and maybe also let those particles travel forwards in time.

[Q]

BTW shouldn´t such a particle be recieved in point B before it was sent out from point A?
No, why would it? Light, while fast, isn't instantaneous.


On the other hand, if this is true, there would be a need to revise the theories of relativity, and maybe also let those particles travel forwards in time.
Particles travel forwards in time by definition (unless Tachyons exist).

[Gustav HK]

But wouldn´t this be like a tachyon? And shouldn´t particles that travel faster than light, travel back in time?

[Bror_Jon]

But wouldn´t this be like a tachyon? And shouldn´t particles that travel faster than light, travel back in time?

Why would they do that? :confused:

[thefinalmarch]

Although, weren't neutrinos weightless?
I was under the assumption they had a very small, but still non-zero mass.

[Rusty Shackleford]

neutrinos have non-zero mass. so, they are something with mass. therefore, mindfuck.


whats next? dividing by zero is now possible?

[Smyg]

whats next? dividing by zero is now possible?

Yes it is. But I advice against it, I'd prefer to keep my universe intact.

[matevz91]

If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

...

Much science-fiction literature is based on the idea that, if the light-speed barrier can be overcome, time travel might theoretically become possible.

...

The existence of the neutrino, an elementary sub-atomic particle with a tiny amount of mass created in radioactive decay or in nuclear reactions such as those in the Sun, was first confirmed in 1934, but it still mystifies researchers.

...

It can pass through most matter undetected, even over long distances, and without being affected. Millions pass through the human body every day, scientists say.


Wow! I was since I know about the light barrier interested into how it can be breached (at least in the vacuum). Even if this are just neutrinos, this is a big discovery! It is one thing if you read about this in a mathematical theory, but it actually being true is just ... I cannot express it. It is like paranormal becaming normal :)

Does this mean that we have to throw away the books about the special theory of relativity? Well, as far as I know, this theory is still correct enough to be used in real life. C can still be maintained as the supremum of speeds that bodies with mass can reach.

It is just one postulate (that C is the ultimate speed of light) being wrong. :) Like one of the postulates of natural numbers being taken for wrong :D :D :D :lol:

Regarding time travel, I suggest that you read the Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction book by Paul J. Nahin.

Anyway, the multiverse theory and the string theory are next to be prooven right...

[Gustav HK]

Why would they do that? :confused:

Don´t know, I am not a particle physcisist. :)

I have just heard something about it.

[piet11111]

But wouldn´t this be like a tachyon? And shouldn´t particles that travel faster than light, travel back in time?

I recall einstein explaining it as looking at the clock on a bell tower that if you where looking at it you would see the light reflecting off it forming the image.
Now if you where in a vehicle going at near light speed away from the clock the light would take much longer to reach you appearing slower (time goes slower the faster you go)
And that if you where going faster then the speed of light that reflecting light would never reach you instead you would see light reflecting off the clock at an earlier time so the clock would appear to be going backwards.

Also i think light speed is not a constant because extreme gravity can bend it (black holes) so i would assume in certain areas in space it should follow that it can move faster or slower due to gravity.

[Nox]

FFS Science is so complicated, I'll just go take the easy way out and grab a Bible :)

[EvilRedGuy]

This is awesome indeed.

:)

[CommunityBeliever]

Tachyonic neutrinos are not a new idea, but now we definitely have pretty convincing evidence for their existence.


dividing by zero is now possible? Only in this sense:

http://www.texify.com/img/%5CLARGE%5C%21%5Clim_%7Bn%20%5Cto%20%5C0%5E%2B%7D% 20%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7Bn%7D%20%3D%20%5Cinfty%20%5C%5C% 5Clim_%7Bn%20%5Cto%20%5C0%5E-%7D%20%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7Bn%7D%20%3D%20-%5Cinfty.gif

[Q]

Also i think light speed is not a constant because extreme gravity can bend it (black holes) so i would assume in certain areas in space it should follow that it can move faster or slower due to gravity.

The speed of light most certainly is a constant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light). Hence the denotation of it as "c", for "constant".

What happens at black holes is that the path of light, in other words the fabric of space-time that light travels through, gets so much bended that it becomes circular around the singularity. This is the socalled event horizon, or the "blackness" of the hole, as light cannot escape it.

[piet11111]

The speed of light most certainly is a constant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light). Hence the denotation of it as "c", for "constant".

What happens at black holes is that the path of light, in other words the fabric of space-time that light travels through, gets so much bended that it becomes circular around the singularity. This is the so called event horizon, or the "blackness" of the hole, as light cannot escape it.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Variable_speed_of_light

Apparently its a controversial theory where i got the thought from.
But seeing this thread topic it might turn out not to be as outlandish anyway.

Either way this topic goes over my head.

[Rss]

Thankfully no.

You're fired.


So does this actually prove that tachyons exist outside theories?

[Olentzero]

What I wanna know is: is it a dot? Or is it a speck? When it's underwater, does it get wet? Or does the water get it instead?

[Princess Luna]

Wait, didn't some scientists in Singapore a few months back declare time travel impossible under the summption that nothing could travel faster then light? also if something was traveling faster then light, how much damage would it do if it collioded with a object, could a pepple traveling at the speed of light destroy the earth? sorry if it is a stupid question

[Q]

also if something was traveling faster then light, how much damage would it do if it collioded with a object, could a pepple traveling at the speed of light destroy the earth? sorry if it is a stupid question

Millions upon millions of neutrinos travel right through your body every second. Doesn't cause any harm.

[SJBarley]

To think, I used to make jokes about taking science specifically to disprove Einstein :laugh:

[Sasha]

Speculating about time travel is all nice and all but that is, if even possible, far far future.
What is getting me exited are questions like is there now a future for neutrino based microprocessors, and neutrino "optic fibre" and stuff?

[Tablo]

Speculating about time travel is all nice and all but that is, if even possible, far far future.
What is getting me exited are questions like is there now a future for neutrino based microprocessors, and neutrino "optic fibre" and stuff?
I could access Revleft 60 nanoseconds faster! :D

[Bandito]

What's the possibility of a mistake in measurement here?

Neutrino speed can be relative in the eye of the observer, because the observer clearly rotated in the angle speed of the Earth revolving around itself and the Sun, galaxy... Mistake could be approximately 0-indefinite in this case. But I'm not a scientist, and those who published the results are clearly more into this than I am, so such a mistake has hardly taken place, I guess...

It is interesting, however, and I'm loving every news that comes from that monster called CERN. I hate the term, especially when it's billions of dollars involved, but CERN is, so far, worth the money invested.

[the last donut of the night]

where's noxion when you need him

[Nox]

I could access Revleft 60 nanoseconds faster! :D

For the cheap price of $49,995 or 5 payments of $9,999. :D

I find it difficult to image neutrino-based optic fibre or processors being affordable.

[Sasha]

For the cheap price of $49,995 or 5 payments of $9,999. :D

I find it difficult to image neutrino-based optic fibre or processors being affordable.

I'm pretty sure people who worked with computers 60 years ago found it not only difficult but even impossible to imagine that their large room sized computers would have only a fraction of the processing power my mobile telephone now has.

And it wouldn't suprise me if the first few metres fibre optic cable, the stuff we now build cheap childrens toys from back in the day also costed $49,995

[StoneFrog]

Speculating about time travel is all nice and all but that is, if even possible, far far future.
What is getting me exited are questions like is there now a future for neutrino based microprocessors, and neutrino "optic fibre" and stuff?

Im dumb, but how do you reflect neutrino's? Since they go through everything, or do they?

[Sasha]

I could access Revleft 60 nanoseconds faster! :D

Well that would be silly but what about a neutrino based interstellar telegraph? on those distances enough "time" might be won to make first contact with alien life actually become a possibility

[ColonelCossack]

:blink::blink::blink::blink::blink::blink::blink:

WOW.

Anyway- if the neutrinos travelled faster than light, wouldn't they go back in time and arrive before they set off? And wouldn't they have infinite mass (being composed of matter and exceeding the speed of light), which would thus infinitely bend space time- which would thus cause them to create a black hole, and go back in time? Or is that what this new finding "disproves"? WTF?

Anyway if this is real it'll be awesome. Some quantum computer shit.

What's next? Superconductors at room temperature? Actually I think this might be bigger... Which is why I suspect that there could be some kind of miniscule (and I mean really infinitesimal) error that could have skewed the results. But I suppose this actual physicists probably already thought of that...

I sense this may end up like cold fusion...

[La Comédie Noire]

This could be like cold fusion where some early tests yielded promising results, but upon further investigation and more precise methodology they turned out to be mistaken.

Hopefully if that is the case people will know to let it go instead of thinking it's a conspiracy to stop "free energy" or some other such nonsense.

Just thought I'd throw that in, I was just reading about the Quine -Duhem thesis and it's nice to see a living example of it.

But let's say the results turn out to be accurate, what concepts do you think will be torn down with the light barrier?

[Sasha]

:blink::blink::blink::blink::blink::blink::blink:

WOW.

Anyway- if the neutrinos travelled faster than light, wouldn't they go back in time and arrive before they set off?...

I believe so yes, but the idea of an constant concept of time is already pretty abstract, i mean I would descibe time in terms like "how long it takes to drop this rock on the ground" which is just a constant here on earth. Now we thought that the speed of light was the ultimate universal constant, and it still very well might be, its just that if your definition of time is "how long it takes light to go from a to b" now suddenly one thing goes faster than time. But I might very well be going completely of the path here, I know nothing about physics

[ColonelCossack]

I know nothing about physics

I don't think anyone really knows much about it at all. Including the physicists themselves at CERN.

[The Vegan Marxist]

POiR5yEk3LA

[Gustav HK]

:blink::blink::blink::blink::blink::blink::blink:
Anyway- if the neutrinos travelled faster than light, wouldn't they go back in time and arrive before they set off? And wouldn't they have infinite mass (being composed of matter and exceeding the speed of light), which would thus infinitely bend space time- which would thus cause them to create a black hole, and go back in time?

Maybe they have. They have created a black hole, which travelled back in time, and destroyed the Solar System at that time. Which means the past of the Earth now only goes some time back. :p

I wonder where (or when). :p

[danyboy27]

CERN ran that experiment 15 000 times.

i find it hard to believe that extremely smart scientist would do a calculation error 15 000 times in a row and not noticing nothing at all.

anyway, i just hope its true, cant wait to see how this potential discovery could redefine our technology.

With the current industrial capacity, a lot of verry nice new stuff could be developped within my lifetime.

and for those worried about the military use of that stuff, well that just the normal course of almost every technological invention since humankind exist.

weapon, sex, and survival, that the main purposes of most technologies.

[Rafiq]

This makes me remember when this Muslim guy told me that the Koran states that nothing is faster than the speed of light and used that to proof the existance of god or whatever, I forget.

Ahahhaah, I wonder what the look on his face will be, better yet what he'll say: "Oh... Actually the Koran sais you can travel faster.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

CERN has already paid for itself a million times over with this discovery alone. Think about all the minds which are profoundly blown by this discovery. Janitors in universities around are currently cleaning the meninges off of the office walls from physicists and astronomers around the world. Grad students in cosmology are jumping up and down knowing that they now have job security for ever.

Good on CERN. With all the bad news in politics and the world, it's nice to know that science can provide the odd profound discovery that shakes the very foundations of our conception of ourselves, the universe, and everything.


Rafiq-nah, Neutrinos are just time-traveling warp-speed angels :D how else does god know everything all at once?

[ZeroNowhere]

CERN has already paid for itself a million times over with this discovery alone.
This isn't a discovery yet.

[Gustav HK]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_Nimtz#Experiments_related_to_superlumi nal_quantum_tunneling

[khad]

There's still some confusion what they mean when they're talking about the speed of light. The speed of light varies by medium, c does not. It could very well be the case that they exceeded the speed of light in the atmosphere without exceeding c.

All in all, as with all new discoveries, some healthy caution is warranted before leaping in.

[MarxSchmarx]

This would be really, really impressive it were true. It's still to be replicated outside of this one experimental setting/lab. It could very well be true, but I think until the exact same effect is observed somewhere else (say in China or on the moon or something), it really should remain a head scratcher. Even then it's still possible that the people building the cern copy or something made the same (latent) systemic engineering error.


This isn't a discovery yet.

If it is replicated, I think it's fair to call this a discovery. But until that point, you're right.




weapon, sex, and survival, that the main purposes of most technologies.

Funny how the internet started out with former and rose to prominence on the second.


There's still some confusion what they mean when they're talking about the speed of light. The speed of light varies by medium, c does not. It could very well be the case that they exceeded the speed of light in the atmosphere without exceeding c.

Hmm I see your point. Do you know if there are things which are faster than light in a given medium?

The reason I ask is that if something reduced the speed of light by some fraction f, then the effective speed is fc. But for your supposition to be true, something would have to reduce the speed of say neutrinos (or whatever) by a faction f' > f, so that f' x N > f x c where N is the speed of neutrinos and N < c. Is such a thing is possible (i.e., something for which f' > f)?

[Klaatu]

Tachyonic neutrinos are not a new idea, but now we definitely have pretty convincing evidence for their existence.

Only in this sense:

http://www.texify.com/img/%5CLARGE%5C%21%5Clim_%7Bn%20%5Cto%20%5C0%5E%2B%7D% 20%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7Bn%7D%20%3D%20%5Cinfty%20%5C%5C% 5Clim_%7Bn%20%5Cto%20%5C0%5E-%7D%20%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7Bn%7D%20%3D%20-%5Cinfty.gif

For a particular limit to exist, they must approach the same value from both directions. (This limit does not exist.)

[Tablo]

Well that would be silly but what about a neutrino based interstellar telegraph? on those distances enough "time" might be won to make first contact with alien life actually become a possibility

Would be awesome, but we need some interstellar travel before that becomes useful. ;)

I'm personally uninterested in extra-terrestrials. I'm sure they exist, but I don't have the imagination to be interested I guess. :P

[MarxSchmarx]

Tachyonic neutrinos are not a new idea, but now we definitely have pretty convincing evidence for their existence.

Only in this sense:

http://www.texify.com/img/%5CLARGE%5C%21%5Clim_%7Bn%20%5Cto%20%5C0%5E%2B%7D% 20%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7Bn%7D%20%3D%20%5Cinfty%20%5C%5C% 5Clim_%7Bn%20%5Cto%20%5C0%5E-%7D%20%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7Bn%7D%20%3D%20-%5Cinfty.gifFor a particular limit to exist, they must approach the same value from both directions. (This limit does not exist.)

Not quite. The limit in this case is presumably defined on the real line so that it does not exist because the Euclidean norm (i.e., |(n-delta)-inf|) is employed in the underlying delta-epsilon proof. With a different definition of the underlying norm the limit could be said to exist.

But it doesn't really matter, because these are in any case merely models of the natural world and say only what we anticipate how nature should behave, not how it does in fact behave.

[Sasha]

Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Details of the Day (http://geeks.thedailywh.at/2011/09/23/faster-than-light-neutrino-details-of-the-day/)

Sep. 23, 2011


http://tdwgeeks.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/c90e1ddb-0f5b-4183-b423-65e34bcd1669.jpg
Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Details of the Day:



CERN presented new details (http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/09/neutrino-results-depend-on-exquisite-measurements-of-time-space.ars) on its reported measurement of a faster-than-light neutrino (http://geeks.thedailywh.at/2011/09/22/possible-faster-than-light-particle-of-the-day/) in a live broadcast today, explaining the extraordinarily thorough steps taken to ensure the readings were accurate.
They profiled the structure of proton bunches, used a picosecond UV laser to check the speed of the signal traveling through the hardware, adjusted their GPS calculations to account for the Earth’s ionosphere, and synced up cesium-based atomic clocks at each end of the experimental setup.
Which is to say, they’re pretty certain that all of the possible errors in their measurements don’t add up to more than the 60-nanosecond gap between the neutrino’s speed and the speed of light.
Only two other particle detectors can check these results. Fermilab’s MINOS is already preparing its own experiment, and Japan’s T2K is on hold after the March earthquake.
[ars (http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/09/neutrino-results-depend-on-exquisite-measurements-of-time-space.ars)]


http://geeks.thedailywh.at/2011/09/23/faster-than-light-neutrino-details-of-the-day/

[matevz91]

The reason I ask is that if something reduced the speed of light by some fraction f, then the effective speed is fc. But for your supposition to be true, something would have to reduce the speed of say neutrinos (or whatever) by a faction f' > f, so that f' x N > f x c where N is the speed of neutrinos and N < c. Is such a thing is possible (i.e., something for which f' > f)?


Well, if I understand your question correctly, you are asking following:
a) we have N-speed of neutrinos, P-speed of photons, P > N, p <= C
b) we slow down neutrinos by f1 (f1 x N = N`), photons by f2 (f2 x P = P`)
c) f1 > f2
č) then N` > P` & N < P

Well, such a thing is possible and is happening all the time. As khad wrote, speed of photons depends on the type of medium they pass through. For example you can take the experiment on Berkley in 2004 where they used a semiconductor to slow photons down to 9,7 km/h.
Neutrinos are much more tricky (as is anyway the case with most quantum particles), because they have at most very very small mass. They are because of that called "ghost particles". They penetrate anything that stands in their way without noticeably stopping down.
Therefore, such f1 and f2 exist, such that f1 x N > f2 x P

Therefore, you can be faster than light in certain mediums, like watter or butter :cool:
--------------------

Now what about the speed of light C? C is the speed of photons in vacuum and is therefore a constant. It is actually the supremum of all possible photon speeds, because even in space there is no such thing as a perfect vacuum.

I hope that this helped...

[Rusty Shackleford]

Only in this sense:

http://www.texify.com/img/%5CLARGE%5C%21%5Clim_%7Bn%20%5Cto%20%5C0%5E%2B%7D% 20%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7Bn%7D%20%3D%20%5Cinfty%20%5C%5C% 5Clim_%7Bn%20%5Cto%20%5C0%5E-%7D%20%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7Bn%7D%20%3D%20-%5Cinfty.gif



i dont know how to read that :crying:

limit divided by variable change to(im probably wrong on that because change is delta yeh?) zero +- 1 over variable equals +- infinity?

i may have taken 2 years of highschool physics. but it was all elementary and mostly mechanical. some magnetism and electronics and waves and shit. some.

[brigadista]

i never studied science/physics so this is is mystery to me, but it does sound exciting . Thanks to all explaining it here[only some of which i understand]. Will be watching this thread or any others about it,please keep posting!:)

[eyedrop]

i dont know how to read that :crying:

limit divided by variable change to(im probably wrong on that because change is delta yeh?) zero +- 1 over variable equals +- infinity?

i may have taken 2 years of highschool physics. but it was all elementary and mostly mechanical. some magnetism and electronics and waves and shit. some.

The first is as 1/n as n approaches 0 from the positive side, and the second one is as n approaches 0 from the negative side.



1 divided by an infinitely small positive number is nearing positive infinity, while 1 divided an infinitely small negative number nears negative infinity.

[Rusty Shackleford]

The first is as 1/n as n approaches 0 from the positive side, and the second one is as n approaches 0 from the negative side.



1 divided by an infinitely small positive number is nearing positive infinity, while 1 divided an infinitely small negative number nears negative infinity.
oooooh ok. but technically, nothing is being divided by zero isnt it? just a very very small positive or negative number? i mean, if there is infinity, that means there is always a non-zero yeah?

[matevz91]

oooooh ok. but technically, nothing is being divided by zero isnt it? just a very very small positive or negative number? i mean, if there is infinity, that means there is always a non-zero yeah?

Yes, nothing is being divided by zero. This only means that number approaches zero as close as you wish (0,0...........................1 for example), but it never reaches zero. Therefore, this number is never zero.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

I believe the timings measured meant that the potential speeds involved exceed that of light in a vacuum (Light traveling 730 kilometers would need 2.4 milliseconds to do so, plus the consideration that to a neutrino, light-years of lead is no more solid than fog), which is why there is so much fuss being made over this result, a six-sigma: [arXiv:1109.4897 (http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897)]

Brian Cox talks about it so much better than I can HERE (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15034852).

If this result is legitimate, then the implications are groundbreaking. Hence why the scientists, skeptical of their own results, have published them for the rest of the scientific community to dissect.

Then orders a beer. A neutrino walks into a bar.

[Le Rouge]

So this means lucky luke is made entirely of neutrinos since he fires faster than his shadow?

[bastart]

This makes me remember when this Muslim guy told me that the Koran states that nothing is faster than the speed of light and used that to proof the existance of god or whatever, I forget.

Ahahhaah, I wonder what the look on his face will be, better yet what he'll say: "Oh... Actually the Koran sais you can travel faster.


Maybe he forgot about Isra Mi'raj. O wait, maybe that's "God's logic" :p

[MarxSchmarx]

Well, if I understand your question correctly, you are asking following:
a) we have N-speed of neutrinos, P-speed of photons, P > N, p <= C
b) we slow down neutrinos by f1 (f1 x N = N`), photons by f2 (f2 x P = P`)
c) f1 > f2
č) then N` > P` & N < P

In so many words, but actually my question is whether there is a medium f1 such that f1 sufficiently greater than f2 so that the results N' > P' hold.

Indeed, since č does not follow from a,b & c, (for examle, if N=P/1000 then if f1 = 1.5*f2 (so thus a and c are true), N'=1.5*f2*P/1000 = 1.5*P'/1000 < P'), the question is one of measured magnitudes of f1, f2.



Well, such a thing is possible and is happening all the time. As khad wrote, speed of photons depends on the type of medium they pass through. For example you can take the experiment on Berkley in 2004 where they used a semiconductor to slow photons down to 9,7 km/h.
Neutrinos are much more tricky (as is anyway the case with most quantum particles), because they have at most very very small mass. They are because of that called "ghost particles". They penetrate anything that stands in their way without noticeably stopping down.

Why don't photons have this property? Are neutrinos of smaller mass than photons?




Therefore, such f1 and f2 exist, such that f1 x N > f2 x P

Therefore, you can be faster than light in certain mediums, like watter or butter :cool:


Again, I'm rather curious whether this has actually been tested or if f1, f2 have been measured. Absent that, the assertion that photons can be slowed down but neutrinos can't seems to be somewhat speculative.





Now what about the speed of light C? C is the speed of photons in vacuum and is therefore a constant. It is actually the supremum of all possible photon speeds, because even in space there is no such thing as a perfect vacuum.

I hope that this helped...

Well, presumably something like this measure holds for neutrinos as well, as I would imagine they travel fastest in a perfect vaccuum. As I understand the CERN experiment (and as Noxion pointed out) the claim is for a perfect vaccuum for neutrinos, so the medium (even if it were the case that in this medium f1 sufficiently > f2) would seem ancillary.

[Gustav HK]

If this is true, it is a lot more impressive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_Nimtz#Experiments_related_to_superlumi nal_quantum_tunneling

[Olentzero]

This occurred to me on the train into work this morning and I think it's being overlooked here.

A phenomenon that seems to contradict a firmly established theory (and Einstein's theories of relativity have been pretty much confirmed by all the evidence gathered over the past century) does not immediately disprove the theory. What proves or disproves the theory is its ability to explain this apparent contradiction.

This is part of the reason why they're not called Einstein's Laws of Relativity - even now they haven't been absolutely proven. So even up to now the best we've been able to say is "Theoretically, nothing can move faster than the speed of light" instead of "Nothing can move faster than the speed of light".

Now the good folks at CERN think they've found something that does. And like good scientists, they're publishing their findings and asking others to verify what they've found. If the other two facilities can duplicate this, then we turn to Einstein's theories to see if they can explain what exactly the hell is going on. If they're able to, then Einstein wasn't wrong - his theories just needed refinement and are that much closer to becoming laws. If they aren't able to at all - then and only then can we say that Einstein was wrong. It's gonna take a while.

TL;DR: Einstein haters don't go breaking out the champagne just yet, despite what the press says. It's gonna take a while.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

The thing is, my understanding is that if this discovery is genuine, and Einstein's theories survive this discovery, then that means time travel is possible, right?

Now, if Faster-than-light travel implies time travel (http://sheol.org/throopw/tachyon-pistols.html), does that mean that "time travel implies FTL"?

Could this result be a first glimpse of the kind of physics that will enable us to stride the stars?

[Leonid Brozhnev]

All this talk of faster than light and time travel makes Red Dwarf seem a little less implausible.:lol:

[matevz91]

In so many words, but actually my question is whether there is a medium f1 such that f1 sufficiently greater than f2 so that the results N' > P' hold.

Indeed, since č does not follow from a,b & c, (for examle, if N=P/1000 then if f1 = 1.5*f2 (so thus a and c are true), N'=1.5*f2*P/1000 = 1.5*P'/1000 < P'), the question is one of measured magnitudes of f1, f2.

Now I think that I understand your question. You are actually interested into the existence of such a physical medium, which has such properties, that it slows down photons by f2 (f2<1) and neutrinos by f1 (f1<1) and f1 >> f2, so that neutrinos are faster than photons. Right?

If f1 is sufficiently greater than f2, that means that neutrinos are slowed down much less than photons.

Quote from wiki about neutrinos: "Neutrinos are affected only by the weak sub-atomic force, of much shorter range than electromagnetism, and are therefore able to travel great distances through matter without being affected by it."

Quote about photons from William Miller: "When light enters a material, photons are absorbed by the atoms in that material, increasing the energy of the atom. The atom will then lose energy after some tiny fraction of time, emitting a photon in the process. This photon, which is identical to the first, travels at the speed of light until it is absorbed by another atom and the process repeats. "

Do you see the distinction now? Neutrinos are like people in the crowd, where everybody is just going in his own way and do not interact much with each other, while photons in the crowd would try to have a conversation with everyone that passes by them. Therefore, in majority of mediums will neutrinos be faster than photons (they would travel the distance faster), even if neutrinos are not actually faster than photons, they just do not "engage in conversations" with other particles they pass by that often as photons.



Why don't photons have this property? Are neutrinos of smaller mass than photons?
Look above. When it comes to quantum particles, there is actually no mass in our "macro sense". To be honest, we do not have a clue what is really there or if those particles even exist in our macro sense. As Einstein would say, it is all about vibrations. And as Sergei Khruschev said, we do not know real laws of micro levels. We just make assumptions on results of our experiments and calculations.
Someday someone will wake up and figure out, that all those type of neutrinos are actually something different altogether. Then another one will follow and the heresy will begin :laugh:

Anyway, my greatest hopes go to the String theory, because this theory has THE maximal potential in the world of physics, as nothing, no matter how alien or paranormal it is, is impossible under it.



Again, I'm rather curious whether this has actually been tested or if f1, f2 have been measured. Absent that, the assertion that photons can be slowed down but neutrinos can't seems to be somewhat speculative.
Look above - neutrinos can be slowed down. Photos actually always travel at the maximum speed of light, they are "kidnapped" by other atoms along the way and that makes them seem slower in non-vacuum mediums. As it goes to scalars f1&f2 and testing, I am not sure. Anyway, neutrinos can easily outrun photons when it comes to "racing through the medium" because of the reasons mentioned above.



Well, presumably something like this measure holds for neutrinos as well, as I would imagine they travel fastest in a perfect vaccuum. As I understand the CERN experiment (and as Noxion pointed out) the claim is for a perfect vaccuum for neutrinos, so the medium (even if it were the case that in this medium f1 sufficiently > f2) would seem ancillary.
Look above.

If I missed something or am wrong somewhere, feel free to correct me. This seems like a interesting topic.

---------------------
BTW about time travel, a must read is the "Time machines, time travel in physics, metaphysics and science fiction" book, written by Paul Nahin.

[Meridian]

This occurred to me on the train into work this morning and I think it's being overlooked here.

A phenomenon that seems to contradict a firmly established theory (and Einstein's theories of relativity have been pretty much confirmed by all the evidence gathered over the past century) does not immediately disprove the theory. What proves or disproves the theory is its ability to explain this apparent contradiction.

This is part of the reason why they're not called Einstein's Laws of Relativity - even now they haven't been absolutely proven. So even up to now the best we've been able to say is "Theoretically, nothing can move faster than the speed of light" instead of "Nothing can move faster than the speed of light".

Now the good folks at CERN think they've found something that does. And like good scientists, they're publishing their findings and asking others to verify what they've found. If the other two facilities can duplicate this, then we turn to Einstein's theories to see if they can explain what exactly the hell is going on. If they're able to, then Einstein wasn't wrong - his theories just needed refinement and are that much closer to becoming laws. If they aren't able to at all - then and only then can we say that Einstein was wrong. It's gonna take a while.

TL;DR: Einstein haters don't go breaking out the champagne just yet, despite what the press says. It's gonna take a while.

I must admit I really dislike the word "law" when used to describe a model for understanding phenomenon. There is implied a jump from explanatory thesis to causal mechanism, although the latter is unrelated to the pattern which happens to match hitherto observed phenomenon.

It strikes me as confusing how a functional map of a location is made with the forming of that location's terrain.

[Olentzero]

A scientific law is just really consensus among the scientific community, nothing more. At some point after observing enough phenomena that behave according to a given theory, the scientific community finally says "This theory is universally applicable, everything we've been able to find and observe conforms to it" and it becomes a law. A properly formed scientific law, as I understand it, never makes any claims as to origins or causal mechanisms - take Newton's First Law of Motion, for example: "A body in motion remains in motion, and a body at rest remains at rest, unless acted on by an outside force". Simple, straightforward description of an aspect of how the universe works - no attempt at explaining why. A solid scientific law.

Anyway that's not why I came back in here; I wanted to tackle ÑóẊîöʼn's question of what this implied for time travel. I actually mulled this question over a while ago, long before this news came out, and my conclusion is that time travel is physically impossible.

Basically, it boils down to this: Every moment in time is characterized by every atom in the universe being in a specific position. And since everything is in motion, atoms in one specific position at one moment in time are in another specific position at another moment in time.

Traveling back in time would mean having to put every individual atom in the Universe back in the position it was at the moment in time we wish to travel to. Say, for example, we pick the classic time traveler's date of 1:34 AM on November 5, 1955. We'd have to reconstitute the entire Universe as it was at that particular moment in order to even hope for the possibility of getting back there successfully.

On the grand scale, that would mean undoing almost sixty years of nuclear fusion at the heart of every star in every galaxy in the Universe, to say nothing of pulling sixty years' worth of material back out of every black hole. A little more locally, it would mean pushing the Earth back into its position fifty-six years ago a little ways back along its path around the center of the Milky Way, as well as the path it's traced as the galaxy speeds away from pretty much everything else. And then there's the matter of undoing all the nuclear explosions we've detonated since the dawn of the atomic age in 1945.

Much more specifically, however, we have to look at the atoms that constitute our time traveller. If our test subject was born after November 5, 1955 - as is more and more likely these days - it means that the atoms constituting his or her body were somewhere else. Which means that we'd have to pull the atoms out of the time traveller to reconstitute the universe as it was before his or her birth. No more time traveller.

Essentially, then, a time machine would have to be able to track the path of every atom that ever existed from the moment of the Big Bang and have enough physical power to reverse entropy at the atomic level. Obviously there's no way you could take something like that with you, which is probably just as well because the time machine would have to be able to take itself apart atom by atom in order to function properly.

[matevz91]

Essentially, then, a time machine would have to be able to track the path of every atom that ever existed from the moment of the Big Bang and have enough physical power to reverse entropy at the atomic level.


You are right, just substitute atoms with all states of all quantum particles that "existed" since then.

Anyway, for me the only logical theory I know about travel into past is jumping between time universes, not altering the universe you are now in. Alternate time universe is created every time something is changed in one of the existing universes and the difference between the new and the old time universe is only that one change.

Therefore, no two time universes can be totally disjunct and as you jump from one to another, you are instantly creating new time universes.

Would be fun to create a java application that simulates this :rolleyes:, but I am afraid that a stack-overflow would occur after some 5 or so of iterations, no matter how big the stack is at the start. Talk about tetration, not exponentiation :thumbup1:

[Olentzero]

Anyway, for me the only logical theory I know about travel into past is jumping between time universes, not altering the universe you are now in. Alternate time universe is created every time something is changed in one of the existing universes and the difference between the new and the old time universe is only that one change.That would be more a hypothesis than a theory, seeing as how nobody's been able to see outside our own universe just yet, and there is no other firm evidence for the existence of other universes outside our own.

[The Vegan Marxist]

I say we time travel back to '91 and assassinate Gorbachev and make sure the pro-Soviet coup succeeds. :)

[Olentzero]

Fuck that, travel back to 1917 and knock Stalin into a canal before he gets to the children.

[The Vegan Marxist]

Fuck that, travel back to 1917 and knock Stalin into a canal before he gets to the children.

Nah, I like my idea better. ;) Either way, great analysis on the "time travel" theory.

[Olentzero]

Thanks!

[Smyg]

You are right, just substitute atoms with all states of all quantum particles that "existed" since then.

Anyway, for me the only logical theory I know about travel into past is jumping between time universes, not altering the universe you are now in. Alternate time universe is created every time something is changed in one of the existing universes and the difference between the new and the old time universe is only that one change.

Therefore, no two time universes can be totally disjunct and as you jump from one to another, you are instantly creating new time universes.

Would be fun to create a java application that simulates this :rolleyes:, but I am afraid that a stack-overflow would occur after some 5 or so of iterations, no matter how big the stack is at the start. Talk about tetration, not exponentiation :thumbup1:

Wait. So, uhm, which universe does the time traveller end up in? :lol:

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Anyway that's not why I came back in here; I wanted to tackle ÑóẊîöʼn[COLOR=Black]'s question of what this implied for time travel. I actually mulled this question over a while ago, long before this news came out, and my conclusion is that time travel is physically impossible.

Basically, it boils down to this: Every moment in time is characterized by every atom in the universe being in a specific position. And since everything is in motion, atoms in one specific position at one moment in time are in another specific position at another moment in time.

Since Einstein tells us that space and time are unified into a single spacetime,, each set of positions is going to be causally connected to its immediate neighbour, either "upstream" or "downstream", since time has a direction. I think it's the whole set of instances and how they are connected that will determine the ability to travel though time, rather than the mere fact of the universe being seperated into discrete snapshots.


Traveling back in time would mean having to put every individual atom in the Universe back in the position it was at the moment in time we wish to travel to. Say, for example, we pick the classic time traveler's date of 1:34 AM on November 5, 1955. We'd have to reconstitute the entire Universe as it was at that particular moment in order to even hope for the possibility of getting back there successfully.

On the grand scale, that would mean undoing almost sixty years of nuclear fusion at the heart of every star in every galaxy in the Universe, to say nothing of pulling sixty years' worth of material back out of every black hole. A little more locally, it would mean pushing the Earth back into its position fifty-six years ago a little ways back along its path around the center of the Milky Way, as well as the path it's traced as the galaxy speeds away from pretty much everything else. And then there's the matter of undoing all the nuclear explosions we've detonated since the dawn of the atomic age in 1945.

Not necessarily. If space and time are unified into spacetime, and if FTL travel is possible, then travelling through time is simply a matter of finding the correct vector through space.

See HERE (http://sheol.org/throopw/tachyon-pistols.html) for more details.


Much more specifically, however, we have to look at the atoms that constitute our time traveller. If our test subject was born after November 5, 1955 - as is more and more likely these days - it means that the atoms constituting his or her body were somewhere else. Which means that we'd have to pull the atoms out of the time traveller to reconstitute the universe as it was before his or her birth. No more time traveller.

Not necessarily - as far as I can tell world lines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_line) can loop back on themselves without problems (paradoxes notwithstanding).

[The Vegan Marxist]

Who would've thought we'd be sitting down, having a scientific discussion about time travel, without it being looked upon as delusional wand waving. lol

[MarxSchmarx]

Now I think that I understand your question. You are actually interested into the existence of such a physical medium, which has such properties, that it slows down photons by f2 (f2<1) and neutrinos by f1 (f1<1) and f1 >> f2, so that neutrinos are faster than photons. Right?

If f1 is sufficiently greater than f2, that means that neutrinos are slowed down much less than photons.

Quote from wiki about neutrinos: "Neutrinos are affected only by the weak sub-atomic force, of much shorter range than electromagnetism, and are therefore able to travel great distances through matter without being affected by it."

Quote about photons from William Miller: "When light enters a material, photons are absorbed by the atoms in that material, increasing the energy of the atom. The atom will then lose energy after some tiny fraction of time, emitting a photon in the process. This photon, which is identical to the first, travels at the speed of light until it is absorbed by another atom and the process repeats. "

Do you see the distinction now? Neutrinos are like people in the crowd, where everybody is just going in his own way and do not interact much with each other, while photons in the crowd would try to have a conversation with everyone that passes by them. Therefore, in majority of mediums will neutrinos be faster than photons (they would travel the distance faster), even if neutrinos are not actually faster than photons, they just do not "engage in conversations" with other particles they pass by that often as photons.


Look above. When it comes to quantum particles, there is actually no mass in our "macro sense". To be honest, we do not have a clue what is really there or if those particles even exist in our macro sense. As Einstein would say, it is all about vibrations. And as Sergei Khruschev said, we do not know real laws of micro levels. We just make assumptions on results of our experiments and calculations.
Someday someone will wake up and figure out, that all those type of neutrinos are actually something different altogether. Then another one will follow and the heresy will begin :laugh:

Anyway, my greatest hopes go to the String theory, because this theory has THE maximal potential in the world of physics, as nothing, no matter how alien or paranormal it is, is impossible under it.



Look above - neutrinos can be slowed down. Photos actually always travel at the maximum speed of light, they are "kidnapped" by other atoms along the way and that makes them seem slower in non-vacuum mediums. As it goes to scalars f1&f2 and testing, I am not sure. Anyway, neutrinos can easily outrun photons when it comes to "racing through the medium" because of the reasons mentioned above.



Look above.

If I missed something or am wrong somewhere, feel free to correct me. This seems like a interesting topic.

---------------------
BTW about time travel, a must read is the "Time machines, time travel in physics, metaphysics and science fiction" book, written by Paul Nahin.

If it were so ubiquitous, then wouldn't results like the cern experiment happen all the time?

I think the only way that the cern results seems so incongruous, therefore, is if they extrapolated from the speed of neutrinos in a medium to what its speed would have to be in a vaccuum and compared that measurement to the speed of light. Because otherwise the explanation you offer is prosaic.

[∞]

Tachyonic neutrinos are not a new idea, but now we definitely have pretty convincing evidence for their existence.

Only in this sense:

http://www.texify.com/img/%5CLARGE%5C%21%5Clim_%7Bn%20%5Cto%20%5C0%5E%2B%7D% 20%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7Bn%7D%20%3D%20%5Cinfty%20%5C%5C% 5Clim_%7Bn%20%5Cto%20%5C0%5E-%7D%20%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7Bn%7D%20%3D%20-%5Cinfty.gif


Infinitely small is the second one. So the first one is infinitely "larger", but less then one?

[∞]

If it were so ubiquitous, then wouldn't results like the cern experiment happen all the time?

I think the only way that the cern results seems so incongruous, therefore, is if they extrapolated from the speed of neutrinos in a medium to what its speed would have to be in a vaccuum and compared that measurement to the speed of light. Because otherwise the explanation you offer is prosaic.
The weak magnetic forces of atoms in this facility (I'm assuming they have to exist), may have influenced the "behavior" of the neutrino. So in a vacuum (assuming CERN didn't test this in a vacuum) that has more ideal circumstances we would get different results..


f=the force that slows photons
p=photons

p(f)<c

But in ideal circumstances: p=c

Speed of neutrino:
v=neutrinos

r= decay (radioactive, beta, etc.) necessary for neutrino to exist

p=electromagnetism necessary for neutrinos to travel.

(delta(r)(p)(v))>c

where p>1 and f<1.

[Sasha]

Physicists Say Speed-of-Light-Breaking Neutrinos Would've Lost Their Energy Along the Way (http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-10/physicists-say-speed-light-breaking-neutrinos-wouldve-lost-their-energy-along-way)

Another day, another wrinkle in the year's biggest physics story
By Clay Dillow (http://www.popsci.com/category/popsci-authors/clay-dillow) Posted 10.03.2011 at 3:30 pm 25 Comments (http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-10/physicists-say-speed-light-breaking-neutrinos-wouldve-lost-their-energy-along-way?page=#comments)

http://www.popsci.com/files/imagecache/article_image_large/articles/opera.jpg The Loading Station at OPERA CERN

Last week’s bombshell physics news (http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-09/baffling-cern-results-show-neutrinos-moving-faster-speed-light)--those superluminal neutrinos that CERN’s OPERA experiment clocked moving faster than the speed of light--are already getting the rigorous vetting that OPERA’s researchers were hoping for. And some physicists are already rejecting the notion that CERN’s neutrinos broke the cosmic speed limit outright. A paper posted (http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.6562) late last week, titled “New Constraints on Neutrino Velocities,” argues that any particle traveling faster than light would shed a great deal of their energy along the way.
And since that didn’t happen, those neutrinos couldn’t have traveled faster than light (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/degrees-of-freedom/2011/10/02/superluminal-neutrinos-would-wimp-out-en-route/). Case closed.
So let’s go a little deeper here. The physicists behind this assessment, Andrew Cohen and Sheldon Glashow of Boston University (Glashow has a Nobel under his belt, so these are no middling minds), ignore the debate over whether or not it’s possible for a fundamental particle to outpace the speed of light, and instead look directly at the OPERA neutrinos themselves.
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http://www.popsci.com/files/imagecache/related_info_thumbnail/articles/opera.jpgBaffling CERN Results Show Neutrinos Moving Faster Than the Speed of Light (http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-09/baffling-cern-results-show-neutrinos-moving-faster-speed-light)http://www.popsci.com/files/imagecache/related_info_thumbnail/articles/saguaroMoon_seip800.jpgRadio Telescopes Turn The Moon Into World's Largest Neutrino Detector (http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-08/radio-telescopes-turn-moon-worlds-largest-neutrino-detector)http://www.popsci.com/files/imagecache/related_info_thumbnail/articles/super-kamiokande_befuellung.jpgWorld's Most Sensitive Neutrino Experiment Launches, To Seek Answers About Matter's Origins (http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-02/worlds-most-sensitive-neutrino-experiment-seeks-answers-about-matters-origins)Tags

Science (http://www.popsci.com/science), Clay Dillow (http://www.popsci.com/category/popsci-authors/clay-dillow), cern (http://www.popsci.com/category/tags/cern), energy (http://www.popsci.com/category/tags/energy), gran sasso (http://www.popsci.com/category/tags/gran-sasso), neutrinos (http://www.popsci.com/category/tags/neutrinos), opera (http://www.popsci.com/category/tags/opera), physics (http://www.popsci.com/category/tags/physics), speed of light (http://www.popsci.com/category/tags/speed-light)
In looking at the neutrino beams that landed at Italy’s Gran Sasso laboratory, Cohen and Glashow found that it was about the same as the beam emitted from CERN in Switzerland. That is, the neutrinos were of roughly the same high-energy flavor at their origin and at their destination. But that’s not possible if these neutrinos surpassed the speed of light, they say. A neutrino achieving superluminal speeds would emit other lower energy particles--most likely an electron-positron pair-- along the way, and in doing so lose a good deal of its own energy. So the neutrino beam arriving at Gran Sasso should have been “significantly depleted” of high-energy neutrinos.
But this was not the case. Which means, they say, that in all likelihood these neutrinos never achieved superluminal speeds. The anomaly is an error in the data or measurement of the speed, or some other brand of misunderstanding or miscalculation.
Which makes a certain amount of sense, writes Steve Nerlich over at Universe Today (http://www.universetoday.com/89377/astronomy-without-a-telescope-ftl-neutrinos-or-not/) over the weekend. Neutrinos do move very fast, straight through the Earth (neutrinos don’t interact much with normal matter), relying on GPS time-stamping and other methods of man-made measurement that are very precise but certainly not infallible to determine time and distance traveled.
And it’s not like these neutrinos were clocked doubling the speed of light or something like that--the difference is 60 nanoseconds. That’s another way of saying that the neutrinos in question are thought to have traveled at 1.0025 times the speed of light. That’s certainly a small enough margin to be explained away by some kind of measurement error.
Still, the jury remains out on this one, and we certainly don’t want to dismiss a perfectly good game-changing science story just because it seems hard to reconcile with the status quo. After all, if OPERA’s result turns out to be confirmed it is going to completely reorient physics as we know them. More on this as it develops.
[SciAm (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/degrees-of-freedom/2011/10/02/superluminal-neutrinos-would-wimp-out-en-route/)]





intresting...

[piet11111]

Or they did go faster then light and also retained all their energy leaving us ....... still unable to explain what the fuck happened until we find a workable theory to explain this.

They where certain nothing could go faster then light so why can they be so certain that they must have lost most of their energy if they did go that fast along the way ?

Isn't it the point of the mass accelerator to have particles go to near light speed so that these extremely short lived particles remain in existence for much longer time due to relativity ?

I am not a physicist but i do not find that explanation very satisfying.

[Sasha]

the barkeeper replies: "sorry, but we don't serve particles faster than light.

A neutrino walks in a bar


:D

[Miguel Detonnaciones]

RevLeft Sciences Forum Participants,

FYI: An hypothesis that may explain the discovery that muon-neutrinos travel faster, in a "vacuum", than do photons -- if that discovery is confirmed -- is described in the following posts, all from another thread in this Forum:






F.E.D.'s Faster-Than-Light Inter-Stellar Drive Hypothesis: Does it Anticipate the Recent CERN / OPERA Finding of possible faster than light velocities of travel by low-mass neutrinos?






Intimations of an Inter-Stellar Drive: "Side-Stepping" the V = c Singularity -- An F.E.D. Hypothesis, Part I.

[¿A "Non-Velocitarian" Pathway from the "Tardyonic Meta-Phase", through the "Luxonic Meta-Phase", to the "Tachyonic Meta-Phase", and back again?]






Part II.: Intimations of an Inter-Stellar Drive: "Side-Stepping" the V = c Singularity -- An F.E.D. Hypothesis.

[¿A "Non-Velocitarian" Pathway from the "Tardyonic Meta-Phase", through the "Luxonic Meta-Phase", to the "Tachyonic Meta-Phase", and back again?





Part III.: Intimations of an Inter-Stellar Drive: "Side-Stepping" the V = c Singularity -- An F.E.D. Hypothesis.

[¿A "Non-Celeritarian" Pathway from the "Tardyonic Meta-Phase", through the "Luxonic Meta-Phase", to the "Tachyonic Meta-Phase", and back again?]




Regards,

Miguel

[∞]

wut?

[Sasha]

RevLeft Sciences Forum Participants,

FYI: An hypothesis that may explain the discovery that muon-neutrinos travel faster, in a "vacuum", than do photons -- if that discovery is confirmed -- is described in the following posts, all from another thread in this Forum:

Regards,

Miguel

note; this is way out of my league so sorry if i say something stupid or obvious..

but the neutrinos in the experiment in question where traveling anything but through a vacuum, in fact they where traveling through hundreds of kilometers of rock, clay and other sediments as they where fired from one deep underground laboratory to another one, and they still arrived faster than the speed of light

[Miguel Detonnaciones]

RevLeft Sciences Forum Participants,

Dear psycho,

You asked --



note; this is way out of my league so sorry if i say something stupid or obvious..

but the neutrinos in the experiment in question where traveling anything but through a vacuum, in fact they where traveling through hundreds of kilometers of rock, clay and other sediments as they where fired from one deep underground laboratory to another one, and they still arrived faster than the speed of light




Response --

"Vacuum speed" is a standard for the way that physicists compare velocities of various "particles".

The "vacuum speed" would be the maximal speed of, e.g., a "photon", a "neutrino", etc.

It is an abstraction -- an idealization -- because a "perfect vacuum" may never exist in fact, especially given incessant "virtual particle" pair "re-creation" and "re-annihilation" in "empty" space.

Multiplicative factors may be used to convert speeds clocked in "resisting media" to idealized "vacuum speeds".

These factors would reflect the "cross-section" of a given "particle" for "interactions" with other entities -- "interactions" that would tend to retard its velocity to something below its "unobstructed", "unresisted", "vacuum velocity".

"Neutrinos" have perhaps the smallest "cross-section" for "interaction", because they interact with other "matter" only via two of the "four" [now "five", counting the "dark force" that drives the accelerating manufacture of new "vacuum" volume] "fundamental forces".

Neutrinos are believed to interact with other matter only via (1) the gravitic force [but only "weakly", since the absolute value of the mass of each neutrino is so small], and (2) the "weak nuclear force" [causes the phenomenon of "radioactivity"], but to lack the (3) electromagnetic interaction, and (4) the "strong nuclear force" interaction.

With such a small "interactions cross-section", neutrinos would be expected to achieve near their ideal "vacuum velocity", even when passing through "dense obstructive media", such as rocky planetary interiors.

Regards,

Miguel

[piet11111]

https://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27260/


The time of neutrino flight is harder to measure. The OPERA team says it can accurately gauge the instant when the neutrinos are created and the instant they are detected using clocks at each end.
But the tricky part is keeping the clocks at either end exactly synchronised. The team does this using GPS satellites, which each broadcast a highly accurate time signal from orbit some 20,000km overhead. That introduces a number of extra complications which the team has to take into account, such as the time of travel of the GPS signals to the ground.
But van Elburg says there is one effect that the OPERA team seems to have overlooked: the relativistic motion of the GPS clocks.
It's easy to think that the motion of the satellites is irrelevant. After all, the radio waves carrying the time signal must travel at the speed of light, regardless of the satellites' speed.
But there is an additional subtlety. Although the speed of light is does not depend on the the frame of reference, the time of flight does. In this case, there are two frames of reference: the experiment on the ground and the clocks in orbit. If these are moving relative to each other, then this needs to be factored in.
So what is the satellites' motion with respect to the OPERA experiment? These probes orbit from West to East in a plane inclined at 55 degrees to the equator. Significantly, that's roughly in line with the neutrino flight path. Their relative motion is then easy to calculate.
So from the point of view of a clock on board a GPS satellite, the positions of the neutrino source and detector are changing. "From the perspective of the clock, the detector is moving towards the source and consequently the distance travelled by the particles as observed from the clock is shorter," says van Elburg.
By this he means shorter than the distance measured in the reference frame on the ground.
The OPERA team overlooks this because it thinks of the clocks as on the ground not in orbit.
How big is this effect? Van Elburg calculates that it should cause the neutrinos to arrive 32 nanoseconds early. But this must be doubled because the same error occurs at each end of the experiment. So the total correction is 64 nanoseconds, almost exactly what the OPERA team observes.
That's impressive but it's not to say the problem is done and dusted. Peer review is an essential part of the scientific process and this argument must hold its own under scrutiny from the community at large and the OPERA team in particular.
If it stands up, this episode will be laden with irony. Far from breaking Einstein's theory of relatively, the faster-than-light measurement will turn out to be another confirmation of it.


Damn if this is true then that is a huge disappointment.

[∞]

From what I hear the scientists are redoing this in more ideal conditions where neutrinos can travel in more of a vacuum. Considering the neutrino is a lepton and is somewhat the cousin of an electron, scientists should be able to get an electron to go 101% the speed of light. That can be extremely problematic theoretically, and scientists would have to rewrite modern physics entirely. I'm skeptical of neutrinos exceeding c.

Considering neutrinos travel through electromagnetism, they should probably compare that to the movement of photons in an electromagnetic field (maybe they did do that, I don't know).

EDIT: Not only would it have us re-imagine special and even general relativity but also Quantum Mechanics, (Theorems in Quantum Mechanics "unify" with special relativity, photons in QM obey E=mc^2).

[Sasha]

Neutrinos Faster Than Light of the Day (http://geeks.thedailywh.at/2011/11/18/neutrinos-faster-than-light-of-the-day/)

Nov. 18, 2011


Add to Favorites (http://geeks.thedailywh.at/#)
Add to My Site (http://geeks.thedailywh.at/#)
http://tdwgeeks.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/41d29fd2-fbe3-42d0-b48d-ee95bbccd469.jpg
Neutrinos Faster Than Light of the Day: Back in September, scientists at CERN claimed to have found that certain subatomic particles can move faster than the speed of light (http://geeks.thedailywh.at/2011/10/17/faster-than-light-neutrino-update-of-the-day/).
When the scientific community lost its collective mind due to these findings, CERN was pressured into re-doing the experiment (http://geeks.thedailywh.at/2011/10/28/new-cern-neutrino-experiment-of-the-day/), but with some changes that many felt would account for the initial results.
They recently performed the new experiment (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/nov/18/neutrinos-still-faster-than-light?newsfeed=true), which showed the same results, while ruling out a potential source of error in the measurements.
In the original experiment, beams of neutrinos were fired from CERN to the Gran Sasso lab in Italy, which is 450 miles away. The neutrinos appeared to arrive sixty billionths of a second earlier than they should have.
In the new experiment, the length of the beams that were sent were greatly reduced, thus removing the task of having to determine the shape and duration of the beam, allowing researchers to focus solely on when the particles arrived. The results still appeared to be the same.
CERN isn’t finished trying to rule out all possible sources of error, including something as simple as making sure that the clocks at both laboratories are perfectly synchronized.
If it turns out the results are not flawed, the findings could show that it’s possible to send information back in time.
Many still feel that these findings are the result of some sort of experimental error, but just in case, I’m gonna start stocking up on dinosaur hunting gear.
[The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/nov/18/neutrinos-still-faster-than-light?newsfeed=true)]

[∞]

I don't know whether to be excited or scared.

[Smyg]

Pleeease let this work out. It's 2011, I demand futuristic science now.

[IndependentCitizen]

We could possibly use the Tea Party as human experiments, put them into a space shuttle and explain to them that there's an ultra-libertarian U.S backed Christian world in another galaxy.

[The Vegan Marxist]

I'd send Stalin a message to kill Khrushchev as soon as possible. Maybe to get Ramon Mercader to do the job. :)

[∞]

Yeah cuz that would be fucking fantastic you genocidal shit! Don't even think about saving your beloved Lenin!

[Le Rouge]

So, they have to write down physics completely?

[∞]

No. But Einstein's theory will have to be revised and and would only be able to apply to 4D, >c^2 physics if neutrinos do travel faster. Just like how Newton's theory only now applies to low-velocity systems.

[Smyg]

I'd send Stalin a message to kill Khrushchev as soon as possible. Maybe to get Ramon Mercader to do the job. :)

Krushchev? I... uhm... could think of better targets. :D

[Le Rouge]

Krushchev? I... uhm... could think of better targets. :D

Stalin

[Broletariat]

Would this mean the start of the Singularity? Beam us back the information that we can beam back information so that we can beam back information so that we can beam back information so that we can FUCK YOU YOU KNOW WHERE THIS IS GOING.

[Krano]

Stalin
Gorbachev

[Le Rouge]

Gorbachev

Why not the person who built capitalism? Or publish the communist manifesto in the 18th century...

[xub3rn00dlex]

Stalin

Marx.

:laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh:

[Le Rouge]

Why marx?

[xub3rn00dlex]

Why marx?

Trololol :D

A serious question though, does this open new doors for fresh theorists to emerge?

[ColonelCossack]

This is one theory that i have heard proposed;

Because neutrinos are so infinitesimally small, they are subject o quantum physics, right? So they managed to "jump" certain section/s of the distance between the emitter and the receiver, so the effectively travelled less than the entire distance, thus making them appear to have been travelling faster than light.

But then again, what are the odds of this happening 15,000 times in a row? An alternative theory that I have seen proposed is that the neutrinos managed to jump to a separate brane where they were somehow able to travel the distance in a shorter time, or they infact travelled less distance, and they reappeared in this brane and arrived at the receiver, having appeared to have travelled faster than light, when really they travelled less distance than they appeared to have done. That or wormholes.

I dunno. :p

[∞]

But then again, what are the odds of this happening 15,000 times in a row? An alternative theory that I have seen proposed is that the neutrinos managed to jump to a separate brane where they were somehow able to travel the distance in a shorter time, or they infact travelled less distance, and they reappeared in this brane and arrived at the receiver, having appeared to have travelled faster than light, when really they travelled less distance than they appeared to have done. That or wormholes.


That implies M-theory.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

Why not the person who built capitalism? Or publish the communist manifesto in the 18th century...

...what,no one wants to kill Hitler? lol

[Miguel Detonnaciones]

Neutrino Experiment Replicates Faster-Than-Light Finding

Latest data show the subatomic particles continue to break the speed limit.
November 18, 2011 |


By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature (http://www.nature.com/news) magazine




Physicists have replicated the finding that the subatomic particles called neutrinos seem to travel faster than light. It is a remarkable confirmation of a stunning result, yet most in the field remain sceptical that the ultimate cosmic speed limit has truly been broken.


The collaboration behind the experiment, called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tracking Apparatus), made headlines in September with its claim that a beam of neutrinos made the 730-kilometer journey from CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva in Switzerland, to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory near L'Aquila, Italy, faster than the speed of light. The result defies Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity (http://www.scientificamerican.com/topic.cfm?id=relativity), which states that this cannot happen.


The result was highly statistically significant, but following author and astrophysicist Carl Sagan's dictum that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, most physicists expressed doubts. Few questioned the carefulness of OPERA's data-taking and analysis, but there was rampant speculation about possible sources of error. Some made claims of mistakes that the collaboration was quick to address (see 'Faster-than-light neutrinos face time trial (http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111005/full/news.2011.575.html)').


One concern was that, at 10.5 microseconds (millionths of a second), the proton pulses that CERN used to generate the neutrino pulses were relatively long. OPERA could not know whether individual neutrinos received at Gran Sasso corresponded to protons early or late in the proton pulse, creating uncertainty around their travel time.


In October, OPERA therefore asked CERN to generate shorter proton pulses, lasting just 3 nanoseconds (billionths of a second), more than 3,000 times briefer than the earlier test. They have now recorded 20 events in the new data run, and have claimed a similar level of statistical significance to the first set of results.


Once again, the neutrinos would beat a light beam to Gran Sasso by 60 nanoseconds. The new result was released on the arXiv preprint server on November 17.




Confidence boost
"It's slightly better than the previous result," says OPERA's physics coordinator, Dario Autiero of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Lyons (IPNL), France. He adds that most of the members of OPERA who declined to sign the original paper because they wanted more time to check the result have now come on board.


One of these is Caren Hagner of the University of Hamburg in Germany. Not only has the beam precision been improved, she says, but the statistical analysis is also more robust and has been replicated by groups within OPERA besides the original team. "We gained much more confidence," Hagner says.


OPERA expects the new result to rule out uncertainties due to duration of the proton pulses. But concerns about the experiment's use of the Global Positioning System (GPS) to synchronize clocks at each end of the neutrino beam are unlikely to be as easily allayed.


GPS, which was used in both the original and latest experiments, is previously untried in the field of high-energy and particle physics. Hagner adds that she would like to see the time measurement checked using another part of the OPERA detector.


For most physicists outside the collaboration, the key test will be replication by an independent experiment. The project best placed to confirm or refute OPERA's result soonest is MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.


In response to the latest OPERA result, MINOS issued a statement saying that it is upgrading its timing system to match OPERA's precision. MINOS might also be able to complete a preliminary check of the OPERA result, using its existing system, as soon as early 2012.


"OPERA is to be congratulated for doing some important and sensitive checks, but independent checks are the way to go," says Rob Plunkett, co-spokesman for MINOS.




http://www.scientificamerican.com/assets/img/global_elements/natnews-115x15.gif (http://www.nature.com/news)

[ColonelCossack]

That implies M-theory.

True.

The physicist who proposed this themselves had some major qualms about it, possibly for this reason.

[the last donut of the night]

fffffffuuuuuuu

[piet11111]

So they still havent ruled out the GPS possibility.

[thefinalmarch]

Why not the person who built capitalism?
No individual "built capitalism".

[Smyg]

Which is unfortunate, the time travelling politburo would have it much easier if it was so.