CERN confirms possible faster than light travel!!

[Skylar1]

If it’s true, it will mark the biggest discovery in physics in the past half-century: Elusive, nearly massless subatomic particles called neutrinos appear to travel just faster than light, a team of physicists in Europe reports. If so, the observation would wreck Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which demands that nothing can travel faster than light.


In fact, the result would be so revolutionary that it’s sure to be met with skepticism all over the world. “I suspect that the bulk of the scientific community will not take this as a definitive result unless it can be reproduced by at least one and preferably several experiments,” says V. Alan Kostelecky, a theorist at Indiana University, Bloomington. He adds, however, “I’d be delighted if it were true.”


The data come from a 1,300-metric-ton particle detector named Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA). Lurking in Italy’s subterranean Gran Sasso National Laboratory, OPERA detects neutrinos that are fired through the Earth from the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. As the particles hardly interact at all with other matter, they stream right through the ground, with only a very few striking the material in the detector and making a noticeable shower of particles.


Over three years, OPERA researchers timed the roughly 16,000 neutrinos that started at CERN and registered a hit in the detector. They found that, on average, the neutrinos made the 730-kilometer, 2.43-millisecond trip roughly 60 nanoseconds faster than expected if they were traveling at light speed. “It’s a straightforward time-of-flight measurement,” says Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern and spokesperson for the 160-member OPERA collaboration. “We measure the distance and we measure the time, and we take the ratio to get the velocity, just as you learned to do in high school.” Ereditato says the uncertainty in the measurement is 10 nanoseconds.

article: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...er-than-light/

[animeyay]

Isn't going over the speed light going against time? Or something like that?
I wish I knew more physics than Einstein but I don't...

[Skylar1]

Isn't going over the speed light going against time? Or something like that?
I wish I knew more physics than Einstein but I don't...

no, it's just that to travel faster than light means your traveling in the opposite direction. you're going so fast that you go backwards.

technically, the speed of light is really just the speed of massless-ness

[Zainox]

no, it's just that to travel faster than light means your traveling in the opposite direction. you're going so fast that you go backwards.

technically, the speed of light is really just the speed of massless-ness

I'm no scientist, but going backwards just dosent seem right to me.. This indeed is cool though.

[animeyay]

technically, the speed of light is really just the speed of massless-ness

but neutrinos have masses, don't they? so wouldn't they always be slower?
sorry if my question was already answered in that article. I figured I wouldn't know enough physics to get it XD

[Cantelope]

no, it's just that to travel faster than light means your traveling in the opposite direction. you're going so fast that you go backwards.

technically, the speed of light is really just the speed of massless-ness

You're not traveling in the opposite direction; it's just that if you move faster than light, you'd be able to reach your destination, turn around 180 degrees and then watch yourself coming towards your destination. In effect, you're now giving information that you are at a location BEFORE the information of your travel there is available, which obviously violates causality.

I'm no expert on particle physics though, so maybe Eris will grace us by dumbing down the topic enough for us to comprehend how these neutrinos would move fast than light. On a possibly related note, I remember the article on physorg about the time traveling Higgs singlet (link: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-...d-machine.html ) talking about "sterile neutrinos" being able to travel faster than light by taking shortcuts through other dimensions, quote here:

Weiler and colleagues Heinrich Päs and Sandip Pakvasa at the University of Hawaii came up with an explanation of the anomalies based on the existence of a hypothetical particle called the sterile neutrino. In theory, sterile neutrinos are even less detectable than regular neutrinos because they interact only with gravitational force. As a result, sterile neutrinos are another particle that is not attached to the brane and so should be capable of traveling through extra dimensions.

If this data from OPERA is confirmed to be reliable, then this is probably a really good boon for M-theory and the Higgs boson, provided the neutrinos being detected are sterile neutrinos. I'm not familiar with the OPERA facility and whatnot though, so these are merely my novice conclusions.

[Dr. Evil]

This is truly monumental. Think about it! If Einstein, one of history's most reputable physicists and thinkers, is proven wrong on the one theory he his most famous for (special relativity), this would certainly shake up anything Einstein or Hawking has ever allegedly proven! This is crazy.

[Ezza Obsuna]

Even so, physicists nowadays have modern machines and inventions that help them in their experiments and research. Einstein and other scientists back then didn't have those advantages so I still give a thumbs up to Einstein.

Anyway, I find this news incredible. And I pity kids in the following generations. They would have more topics to learn. 0.o

[Equilibrium]

If this proves to be true. It would wreck havoc on Low Latency Trade Markets. It would be messy

[TheAsterisk!]

Unless you yourself are (1) a hard science-fiction writer or (2) a scientist in the relevant (or another related) field, it's often counter-productive to follow the very latest, as-yet-unconfirmed science news. Einstein's general relativity was supposedly disproved a couple of times before it was confirmed- mostly because of inaccurate measurements and whatnot. Point is, those first few declarations of "Wrong!" were not spot-on.

Unless you yourself are capable and equipped to help confirm or refute the data or hypotheses, just wait a few years and let things get sorted out. There are a lot of "Whoops! Uh... Never mind. Strike that." moments at the cutting edge of scientific discourse.

[Archaic Devices]

Darnit eric, you beat me to it! Anyway, I'm very excited about this. Just the other day we were discussing in class how nothing can go faster than the speed of light, and then they reveal this! I hope they can definitely prove this.

[Eris]

It's too early to say anything yet. It may just be a measurement error. It's also important to realize that Special Relativity is not wrong. There are a lot of experiments saying it is very much right. What this means is that Special Relativity is incomplete, in the same way Newtonian mechanics is incomplete, but still very much useful here on earth. There's no telling what new physics this will unravel (if indeed it does turn out to be more than a measurement error), but there's no reason to think there will be faster-than-light travel or anything like that at this point.

[Xeyuzio]

"Faster than light you say. "

[DOOM!]

Ohoo, just wait till the guys at the bar hear this. Now I can finally troll them with a classical "Where's your Einstein now!?!"

[Keena]

Darnit eric, you beat me to it! Anyway, I'm very excited about this. Just the other day we were discussing in class how nothing can go faster than the speed of light, and then they reveal this! I hope they can definitely prove this.

He beat me to it as well >_<

This is quite intriguing though. Maybe the speed of light will become a thing of fantasy if this is proven!

[Sgt.Pepper]

I find this incredibly amazing. If it is true, then it would definitely rewrite Physics. It also proves that we don't know even 10% of our world and the universe.

[battousai_ryuu]

Okay, heres the deal, we talked about this yesterday in class. I am currently in physics 1100 at my college and my teacher's husband is working at Fermi Lab here in Illinois.
Years ago when fermi lab first started tooling around with their particle accelerator they encountered particles moves at speeds faster then light (amost twice as fast). Unsure if this finding was correct they never published it. Upon further research and examination they came to the concluse that their reading was false (since the technology was new at the time)
Now Cern is talking with Fermi Lab to see what possibly went wrong over at Cern. It's expected to take about 6-9months to go through everything and retest to see if Cerns findings were correct or just a fluke like what happened at Fermi Lab.

Sometimes it's a small world Guess I took Phyics at the right time.