CERN researchers claim superluminal neutrinos

[mkrishnan]

If this turns out to be replicable, this is very interesting.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/22/science-light-idUSL5E7KM4CW20110922

Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the researchers, told Reuters 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."

I haven't seen the research, but from the sound of the scenario, these are simply neutrinos traveling faster than light, rather than any of the harder to imagine scenarios like superluminal transit being accompanied by some non-causal relationship (that is, time travel) that relativity would suggest. And I'm not aware of any reason to expect neutrinos to just start traveling faster than the speed of light.

It'll be really interesting to see if there are any flaws in this research, or if they've found something new and unexpected.

 

[Peace]

This would make Einstein roll over in his grave if true.

 

[skunk]

The idea of moving faster than light is full of interesting ramifications. What do you see when you overtake light?

 

[bigjobby]

Could it be that the speed of light as we know/knew it was actually, albeit ever so slightly, wrong all along? Or is it the birth of time travel?

 

[skunk]

Could it be that the speed of light as we know/knew it was actually, albeit ever so slightly, wrong all along? Or is it the birth of time travel?

The speed of light has been calculated over enormous distances: the possible margin of error is unimaginably small.

 

[mkrishnan]

The speed of light has been calculated over enormous distances: the possible margin of error is unimaginably small.

Yes, it's much more likely that something else would turn out to be wrong with this study than that our value for the speed of light is wrong.

 

[bigjobby]

The speed of light has been calculated over enormous distances: the possible margin of error is unimaginably small.

all depends how 'unimaginably small' is defined I guess because those particles were only travelling a few billionths of a sec quicker than c. I'm no physicist but find the findings very interesting.

 

[skunk]

all depends how 'unimaginably small' is defined I guess because those particles were only travelling a few billionths of a sec quicker than c. I'm no physicist but find the findings very interesting.

I would imagine that the speed of light has been measured with ever-increasing sophistication since the original calculations. I expect that a billionth of a second is a significant and accurately measurable variation.

 

[mkrishnan]

I would imagine that the speed of light has been measured with ever-increasing sophistication since the original calculations. I expect that a billionth of a second is a significant and accurately measurable variation.

For what it's worth, I believe Geneva and San Grasso are about 1400km apart, and so if I did my math right, it takes light somewhere around 4.7e-03 seconds (just for order of magnitude) to get from one to the other. So for order of magnitude, the speed of light would have to be wrong by 0.001% (hopefully I did the back of the envelope math right) which would actually be a pretty large error. Billionths of seconds sound like very small intervals of time, but measuring time on the nanosecond scale is actually pretty easy -- non-optical electronics have a 1-2 nanosecond kind of resolution without a lot of gimmicks. On an optical scale, 60 nanoseconds is a lot of time.

 

[skunk]

Thank you for confirming my uninformed, amateur speculation with some cold, hard facts.

 

[MultiM]

I don't even pretend to know the math or any details regarding FTL. I just got a bit of an excited lump in my throat when I read this because I'm a huge SciFi fan and love the idea of FTL travel. I wanna go now, please...

 

[Shrink]

For what it's worth, I believe Geneva and San Grasso are about 1400km apart, and so if I did my math right, it takes light somewhere around 4.7e-03 seconds (just for order of magnitude) to get from one to the other. So for order of magnitude, the speed of light would have to be wrong by 0.001% (hopefully I did the back of the envelope math right) which would actually be a pretty large error. Billionths of seconds sound like very small intervals of time, but measuring time on the nanosecond scale is actually pretty easy -- non-optical electronics have a 1-2 nanosecond kind of resolution without a lot of gimmicks. On an optical scale, 60 nanoseconds is a lot of time.

OK, I'm impressed. Make me feel like a complete dummy!

(Barely passed high school physics - back BEFORE quantum physics. )

 

[bigjobby]

For what it's worth, I believe Geneva and San Grasso are about 1400km apart, and so if I did my math right, it takes light somewhere around 4.7e-03 seconds (just for order of magnitude) to get from one to the other. So for order of magnitude, the speed of light would have to be wrong by 0.001% (hopefully I did the back of the envelope math right) which would actually be a pretty large error. Billionths of seconds sound like very small intervals of time, but measuring time on the nanosecond scale is actually pretty easy -- non-optical electronics have a 1-2 nanosecond kind of resolution without a lot of gimmicks. On an optical scale, 60 nanoseconds is a lot of time.

If only they had a 'takes a bow' emoticon on these forums.

 

[localoid]

What fresh hell can this be?

Wow. That was quick. Seems like just yesterday that they first detected a tau particle in a muon neutrino beam, but it actually was over a year ago. How time flies...

Go particles!

For what it's worth, I believe Geneva and San Grasso are about 1400km apart...

Gran Sasso? Appears to be 732.

Image from: http://operaweb.lngs.infn.it/spip.php?rubrique41

 

[cantthinkofone]

It's the black hole they all warned us about!!! It's absorbing the light!!!



I hope this turns out to be true. I want to be able to say "back in my dad we didn't have field trips to Proxima Centauri".

 

[jav6454]

Faster than light travel? Something is wrong or about to make many Physicists turn over...

 

[MRU]

So basically

E=MC2 is now wrong


However fret not because

an E + MC Hammer still = 80's party!

 

[miles01110]

On an optical scale, 60 nanoseconds is a lot of time.

I wouldn't say it's "a lot." "Significant" maybe, if it turns out to be correct (which probably won't happen).

Edit: Here's a pretty good article about the situation.

http://profmattstrassler.com/2011/09/20/supernovas-and-neutrinos/

Among the relevant parts,

By the way, if you happen to read articles about this elsewhere, please don’t be confused by people suggesting that OPERA has a “6-sigma observation” of something new. Such language seems at first to imply a very clear sign of something novel and extraordinary — that the discrepancy observed in the data must be a real effect. But all it really means is that the effect can’t be a statistical fluke, or due to a known systematic effect. It could still be due to a mistake, or something wrong with the apparatus, rather than a new physical phenomenon.

As I mentioned, the neutrinos from the 1987 supernova arrived on earth within 13 seconds of each other, and were followed within at most 3 hours by the light from the supernova, the delay being roughly as expected. These coincidences are considerable evidence that the neutrinos were traveling neither significantly slower nor faster than light, and that they were all traveling at almost the same speed. Think about it: these neutrinos traveled for 168,000 years, about 5 trillion seconds, and arrived on earth within about 13 seconds of each other, and within 3 hours (about 10,000 seconds) of the light. If the neutrinos had been traveling 1 part in a million faster than the speed of light, they would have arrived months before the light; a part in a million slower, and they would have arrived months later. And if they had traveled at different speeds by even one part in a billion, they would have arrived not in a 13 second burst but spread out over hours.

In short, there is evidence from this data that the neutrinos traveled at the speed of light to an extremely good approximation — to perhaps a few parts in a billion.

 

[iJohnHenry]

Do they allow for the time it takes for electrical energy to pass through their test equipment?

 

[mkrishnan]

Ahhh, okay, so they're much closer than that -- meaning that the error in the speed of light would be even larger. Anyways. Shame on me for using Google Maps to guess how far apart they were.

I wouldn't say it's "a lot." "Significant" maybe, if it turns out to be correct (which probably won't happen).

Sorry, I just meant in optical physics 60 ns is a lot -- when I did optics I was working in the picosecond to femtosecond time scale. I just mean that, at least inside the lab, nanoseconds are easy to measure. It's impressive to measure something to nanoseconds with the origin event 100s of km away, though.

Actually, what's oddest about these results, if they're correct, is that matter is not engaging in some Battlestar Galaticesque jumping through space at speeds far exceeding light, but neutrinos are just going a tiny bit faster than light under what is not particularly a novel circumstance. Rather, the neutrinos in this experiment are presumably doing what neutrinos are always doing.....

 

[chown33]

Maybe c has been misdefined as the speed of light (photons), when it should be defined as the speed of neutrinos.

 

[Sydde]

Maybe c has been misdefined as the speed of light (photons), when it should be defined as the speed of neutrinos.

This is a valid point. Neutrinos are very exotic particles with a vanishingly small rest mass and very strange behavior patterns. They can apparently change from one type of particle to another for no obvious reason and can pass through an entire galaxy worth of matter without being affected.

Here on earth, space-time is distorted by this planet's gravity well — enough that adjustments based on Einstein's math must be made in order for GPS satellites to return usable numbers. Given that neutrinos are such aloof beasts, perhaps they cross only flat space-time that we measure through the lens of gravimetric distortion (they take a shortcut). Or something like that.

 

[Messy]

So basically

E=MC2 is now wrong


However fret not because

an E + MC Hammer still = 80's party!

Not really. Like all theories, it's simply evolved.

E=Energy
M=Mass
C2=Speed of light squared.

C now simply refers to the speed of a neutrino squared.

Just to clear some other stuff up about Einstein too, he never said that something couldn't go faster than the speed of light. He said matter couldnt *accelerate* to the speed of light because it's mass would be infinite, he also said nothing about matter already travelling at the speed of light or greater.

So many people jumping on this 'Einstein is wrong' bandwagon whilst not understanding his theorys and what he actually claimed.

 

[dukebound85]

Not really. Like all theories, it's simply evolved.

E=Energy
M=Mass
C2=Speed of light squared.

C now simply refers to the speed of a neutrino squared.

Just to clear some other stuff up about Einstein too, he never said that something couldn't go faster than the speed of light. He said matter couldnt *accelerate* to the speed of light because it's mass would be infinite, he also said nothing about matter already travelling at the speed of light or greater.

So many people jumping on this 'Einstein is wrong' bandwagon whilst not understanding his theorys and what he actually claimed.

Yea, don't think it works like that

 

[fireshot91]

Yea, don't think it works like that

Me either.


And say an object (of significant size, such as like....a ball) is traveling faster than the speed of light. Would the object going through the air actually be some time behind where the object is at the moment? Since it's going faster than the speed of light, it'd be at point A, when you see it at point B.


*Balls path* ------------B----------------------A


*You*



How is that time travel? Wouldn't that be more of a form of teleportation? Not actually moving the particles through space and time, but moving faster than you can see, so the object ends up at another place faster than you can see?