Neutrinos Clocked Traveling Faster than Light?
Huh?
A pillar of physics – that nothing can go faster than the speed of light – appears to be smashed by an oddball subatomic particle that has apparently made a giant end run around Albert Einstein’s theories.
Scientists at the world’s largest physics lab said Thursday they have clocked neutrinos traveling faster than light. That’s something that according to Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity – the famous E (equals) mc2 equation – just doesn’t happen.
“The feeling that most people have is this can’t be right, this can’t be real,” said James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The organization, known as CERN, hosted part of the experiment, which is unrelated to the massive $10 billion Large Hadron Collider also located at the site.
That brings us to the best part of the article.
Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded researchers that they are asking others to independently verify the measurements before claiming an actual discovery.
“They are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they’ve done and really scrutinize it in great detail, and ideally for someone elsewhere in the world to repeat the measureme
They want their work checked. Would that other scientists in some other fields followed that admirable lead.
I’d be willing to bet that this doesn’t hold up. Either the original team or others will find a flaw somewhere. But good on this group for doing work that challenges the consensus and then asking others to double check them. That is how science works — by challenging, rather than embracing and enforcing — the consensus. Galileo, Hubble and Einstein would appreciate the consensus challengers a whole lot more than the consensus enforcers.
Or, maybe not. Einstein famously added a “fudge factor” to combat Hubble’s findings on the beginning of the universe when those challenged Einstein’s steady state assumptions.
Meh.
And I can hardly wait for Johnny to show up and tell us why this proves global warming.
Complete with smarmy acronyms and links to ThinkProgress, no doubt.
Wait… how would this even be possible. Even IF the neutrino could travel faster than light how could we tell?
The neutrinos were generated in Switzerland and were detected in Italy (450 miles away) sooner than they should have been.
Everybody knows the neutrinos don’t run on time in Italy.
Well, not since Mussolini, anyway.
You guys are hilarious.
they know when the particles were generated; they know when they were detected hundreds of miles away. if the neutrinos had arrived late, it would have been a slap a current theory that neutrinos have almost no interaction with matter. the bigger problem is that they arrived 60 nanoseconds early.
the experimental error was +/- 10 nanoseconds. in 60 nanoseconds, light travels [in vacuum] about 18 meters, which is an enormous deviation.
also note that neutrinos are not supposed to be going at even the speed of light in the first place.
note that i said “almost no interaction with matter.” there is enough of an interaction that by using tons of matter in the detector, a few out of billions of neutrinos do interact, creating a result that can be detected.
There are naturally-ocurring particles that scientists speculate may go faster than light but no one has ever been able to really prove it happens, so it’s not as if the possibility has never been seriously considered before. This would show that time travel is possible, too. You see, in the CERN experiments these little neutrinos arrived at their destination BEFORE they were supposed to….
How cool is that?
Now we just need to figure out how to turn into neutrinos, and we’re off. Oh, and how to turn back when we’re there.
And when other scientists ran the equations, they discovered the mistake–if memory serves Einstein had ended up dividing by zero–and pointed it out. Einstein immediately removed the “fudge factor.”
That’s how science is supposed to work, not the echo chamber of AGW “science.”
ConservativeWanderer – When Bryan said: “They want their work checked. Would that other scientists in some other fields followed that admirable lead,” I was thinking to myself just about what you said. In particular, why haven’t the AGW folks do the same thing? Since they haven’t, they must not be real scientists.
I see great minds think alike.
Of course, they do make a great pretense out of “peer review,” but their definition of “peer” is “another True Believer.” If a skeptic tries to check their work, they start screaming bloody murder.
The “fudge factor” was the cosmological constant, which Einstein died believing was his greatest mistake. Funny thing is, in the past few years discovering that the expansion of the universe is accelerating makes it look like he might have been right all along.
Yes. They call it dark energy…the jury is out on this, however.
Hypothetically, there may exist particles that can’t travel slower than the speed of light. They’ve been called tachyons. Looking at the basic equations, as a particle approaches the speed of light, its mass approaches infinity and its length contracts to nothing. Nothing from this side of the speed of light can go faster according to theory. However, above the speed of light, you have the square root of a negative number, or i. Imaginary numbers have their uses in mathematics. We’ve just never been able to detect they hypothetical tachyons and they may not exist. But then again, they just might.
The appearance of tachyons in an equation is generally regarded as an indicator of error, not a prediction that they exist.
If the neutrinos are going faster than the speed of light, shouldn’t some of them have been detected in Italy before they left Switzerland?
Not if they were using stolen passports.
/BA-Dum-Bump!
Even at the speed of light, it takes a certain amount of time to traverse distance. This is where the term light-year comes from, along with the lesser-used light-month, light-minute, and light-second.
Therefore, there would still have been a slight delay as the neutrinos covered the distance, though it would not have been perceptible to human senses.
If you want to arrive before you leave, you have to break the time barrier, not the light barrier.
You’re correct, Dana.
However, as soon as the neutrinos landed in Italy and got a look at the economy, they fled back to Switzerland.
Lol.
Yes, there are more ways to take a giant step backwards than just traveling through time. Instead of exceeding the speed of light, the Italians just took a short cut by seeing how fast they could spend money.
I think the Italians misconstrued that old saying, Time equals Money. They took it as a literal, mathematical formula.
“I’d be willing to bet that this doesn’t hold up.”
A safe bet….but consider how many times theories considered most basic and sound have been upended.
We should not assume that super-luminal particles can interact with matter.
Likely outcome is a boo-boo of sort.
I’m blaming the French.
We also should not assume that they cannot.
Lacking data, we should make no assumptions at all.
Typical French response.
It’s impossible for particles to travel faster than the speed of light due to the fact that most scientists agree they can’t, and also because the science is settled.
(Now leaving AGW, true believer/idiot mode…my comments should start making sense again shortly).
Lubos ain’t buying it:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/09/italian-out-of-tune-superluminal.html#more
But what does a climate denier know?
The magnitude of the difference in speeds suggests experimental error.
I mean, come on, we want to go way faster than that.
What a tease!