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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Purgatory: Faster than Light
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Tortuf
Ship's fisherman
# 3784
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Posted
Scientists at CERN have apparently measured particles traveling faster than the speed of light.
Of course, according to good old Al Einstein this is impossible. Or, according to Albert Einstein maybe not.
Is E = MC2 wrong?
Do we go back and start all over? That is possible given that the special theory of relativity has never been able to explain quantum physics and all the grand unification theories that base themselves on the Special Theory of Relativity either don't work, or are so complex that they are suspect on that ground alone.
And, what does this discovery say about the ability of science to describe the nature of God?
[ 05. January 2015, 20:59: Message edited by: Kelly Alves ]
Posts: 6963 | From: The Venice of the South | Registered: Dec 2002
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the giant cheeseburger
Shipmate
# 10942
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Posted
Given the well-documented troubles that CERN has had since the LHC opened, I think the scientists should get around to checking their instruments before their stakeholders pull the funding and send them to measure they speed of an unemployment benefit queue.
Describing the nature of God? Impossible.
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If I give a homeopathy advocate a really huge punch in the face, can the injury be cured by giving them another really small punch in the face?
Posts: 4834 | From: Adelaide, South Australia. | Registered: Jan 2006
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Ikkyu
Shipmate
# 15207
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Posted
It would be a lot of fun if the result were verified, but according to this article it probably won't be.
Wired Article
Particle physicists have been looking for phenomena that are not explained by our current "Standard Model of particle Physics" for a long time. But so far the LHC has not provided any.
Posts: 434 | From: Arizona | Registered: Oct 2009
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Doc Tor
Deepest Red
# 9748
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Posted
Like the bloke quoted in the Wired article, I'd put money on it being a systematic timing error. 60ns equates to 18m - and apparently they're relying on GPS to tell them how far apart CERN and the detector are.
GPS can be very accurate (certainly better than 18m), but there are whole host of variables involved. I'd be checking those very carefully, as well as attempting to calculate the distance using a physical method if at all possible. I'm reasonably certain that an actual survey with theodolites could have the distance down to the nearest centimetre.
But if it's all true? Egad. ![[Confused]](confused.gif)
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Forward the New Republic
Posts: 9131 | From: Ultima Thule | Registered: Jul 2005
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Alan Cresswell
Mad Scientist 先生
# 31
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Posted
The results need to be verified. Although I'm sure they've done all they can to eliminate systematic errors, or identify instrumental causes for the observed effect, it would need independent verification. Peer review of publications describing the experimental setup and results would be a start. Repeating the experiment elsewhere and over longer distances would be essential too.
But, if it proves to be correct then it would need a major rethink of General Relativity. But the difficulties of integrating Quantum Theory and Relativity already puts both models under scrutiny anyway.
As an aside, this experiment is unrelated to the LHC. It would also be primarily concerned with attempting to determine a mass (if any) for neutrinos and whether they fluctuate between forms. The speed measurement is a bonus.
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Don't cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.
Posts: 32413 | From: East Kilbride (Scotland) or 福島 | Registered: May 2001
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Eutychus
From the edge
# 3081
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Posted
As usual, xkcd has the last word.
(And it will always be the last word, because since the speed of light has been exceeded,... nevermind)
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Let's remember that we are to build the Kingdom of God, not drive people away - pastor Frank Pomeroy
Posts: 17944 | From: 528491 | Registered: Jul 2002
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Porridge
Shipmate
# 15405
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Posted
With the speed of light now exceeded, I look forward to being able to go somewhere and then watch myself arrive . . .
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Spiggott: Everything I've ever told you is a lie, including that.
Moon: Including what?
Spiggott: That everything I've ever told you is a lie.
Moon: That's not true!
Posts: 3925 | From: Upper right corner | Registered: Jan 2010
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tclune
Shipmate
# 7959
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Apocalypso:
With the speed of light now exceeded, I look forward to being able to go somewhere and then watch myself arrive . . .
You must be a lot more attractive than I am...
--Tom Clune
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This space left blank intentionally.
Posts: 8013 | From: Western MA | Registered: Jul 2004
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Porridge
Shipmate
# 15405
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Posted
Or just more bored.
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Spiggott: Everything I've ever told you is a lie, including that.
Moon: Including what?
Spiggott: That everything I've ever told you is a lie.
Moon: That's not true!
Posts: 3925 | From: Upper right corner | Registered: Jan 2010
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LeRoc
Famous Dutch pirate
# 3216
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Posted
Does this mean that CERN is going to create that Black Hole now?
FWIW, I'm not getting too excited before this is replicated, but it would be very cool if it were true.
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I know why God made the rhinoceros, it's because He couldn't see the rhinoceros, so He made the rhinoceros to be able to see it. (Clarice Lispector)
Posts: 9474 | From: Brazil / Africa | Registered: Aug 2002
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Doc Tor
Deepest Red
# 9748
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Posted
Someone on another forum pointed out that the neutrino burst from a distant supernova arrived exactly the same time as the visible light - if the neutrinos had gone superluminal* by the same margin as reported here, they'd have been detected six months earlier, due to the distance of the star.
*I'd just like to point out how cool this word is, not just from a scientific point-of-view, but from a science fictional one, too. Superluminal. ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
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Forward the New Republic
Posts: 9131 | From: Ultima Thule | Registered: Jul 2005
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Eutychus
From the edge
# 3081
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Posted
Another xkcd reader, huh? ![[Biased]](wink.gif)
Someone else on the forum quoted from this fascinating article entitled "The decline effect and the scientific method", which goes some way to explaining 1) why exciting results get published 2) why they become increasingly harded to replicate.
The article concludes thus: quote:
When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.
I have bookmarked it as ammunition for my long-runnung arts-background war with hard scientists ![[Two face]](graemlins/scot_twoface.gif)
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Let's remember that we are to build the Kingdom of God, not drive people away - pastor Frank Pomeroy
Posts: 17944 | From: 528491 | Registered: Jul 2002
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Moo
Ship's tough old bird
# 107
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Posted
There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was much faster than light.
She set out one day
In a relative way
And arrived on the previous night
Moo
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Kerygmania host
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See you later, alligator.
Posts: 20365 | From: Alleghany Mountains of Virginia | Registered: May 2001
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Doc Tor
Deepest Red
# 9748
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Eutychus:
Someone else on the forum quoted from this fascinating article entitled "The decline effect and the scientific method", which goes some way to explaining 1) why exciting results get published 2) why they become increasingly harded to replicate.
Absolutely fascinating, and duly noted.
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Forward the New Republic
Posts: 9131 | From: Ultima Thule | Registered: Jul 2005
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Porridge
Shipmate
# 15405
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Posted
Wow. That is a very interesting piece. A little frightening, but well-worth the reading.
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Spiggott: Everything I've ever told you is a lie, including that.
Moon: Including what?
Spiggott: That everything I've ever told you is a lie.
Moon: That's not true!
Posts: 3925 | From: Upper right corner | Registered: Jan 2010
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Timothy the Obscure
Mostly Friendly
# 292
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
Someone on another forum pointed out that the neutrino burst from a distant supernova arrived exactly the same time as the visible light - if the neutrinos had gone superluminal* by the same margin as reported here, they'd have been detected six months earlier, due to the distance of the star.
*I'd just like to point out how cool this word is, not just from a scientific point-of-view, but from a science fictional one, too. Superluminal.
Yes--now, instead of FTL drives we have Superluminal drives. It's much more poetic.
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When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.
- C. P. Snow
Posts: 6114 | From: PDX | Registered: May 2001
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Ender's Shadow
Shipmate
# 2272
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Posted
Indeed the decline effect is fascinating, as is the way that scientists assume that the effect is caused by methodological problems and isn't 'real'. Which is probably inevitable - the alternative is that the rules are changing all the time which is a rather different universe from the one we're used to. But the evidence that effects do disappear does seem to be rather strong
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Test everything. Hold on to the good.
Please don't refer to me as 'Ender' - the whole point of Ender's Shadow is that he isn't Ender.
Posts: 5018 | From: Manchester, England | Registered: Feb 2002
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Schroedinger's cat
Ship's cool cat
# 64
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Posted
Science has always involved faith - choosing what to believe, if you want.
The truth is, that, if this is proven to be true*, it will change one of the core beliefs of science. But then the world will adjust around this, and new theories will appear, and a new understanding of the world will be generated - including explanations of why this was not seen previously. But it will be included in the new canon of science.
* Which we will have to wait and see for. And it might be that there are reasons for this anomaly, which in itself would be interesting.
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Blog
Music for your enjoyment
Lord may all my hard times be healing times
take out this broken heart and renew my mind.
Posts: 18859 | From: At the bottom of a deep dark well. | Registered: May 2001
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Boogie
Boogie on down!
# 13538
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Posted
It'll be fun if they are wrong -
Jim Al-Khalili, a physicist from the University of Surrey has said:
"So let me put my money where my mouth is: if the Cern experiment proves to be correct and neutrinos have broken the speed of light, I will eat my boxer shorts on live TV."
Bring it on!
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Garden. Room. Walk
Posts: 13030 | From: Boogie Wonderland | Registered: Mar 2008
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
The decline effect is perhaps fascinating, but it sure is old news. See here the discussion by Feynman in 1974 under the appropriate label "cargo cult science". Also look here, for example at the neutrino lifetime or the omega width. If we read these plots with the assumption (!) that we are seeing a convergence to "truth", then clearly errors are terribly underestimated most of the time, and biases / systematic dependencies on prior work need decades to be overcome.
While I was still in high energy physics, we were also quite aware of the "HERA effect". That is, it was expected that every time just before its next funding round DESY HERA would report the likely identification of some exotic "new physics" particle with considerable statistical significance (generating a burst of theoretical papers), a significance that would then decay away over subsequent measurements until it was replaced by the next sensation before the next funding round... But if you think that I've just accused people of scientific fraud, then you have not understood the real problem, which is much more problematic than intentional wrongdoing.
I would like to point out though that the attempt of governments and their funding agencies to turn universities / institutes into "lean, mean science machines" is taking its toll. It may sound like a brilliant idea to take the slack out of the system. Finally, scientists that work 24/7 for the good money of the taxpayer, and all that... But the slack also provided room for error correction. A misstep now is easily fatal in particular for a budding academic career. One must ever race from one brilliant success to the other, or the other scientific rats will pull ahead. The relentless effort to reshape science into yet another "market economy" is thus having its effect. Scientific truth is becoming a commodity, mined by some, traded by others, and one shouldn't be particularly surprised if people are starting to "play the scientific market" in ways we once would have considered shocking.
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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Boogie
Boogie on down!
# 13538
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
The relentless effort to reshape science into yet another "market economy" is thus having its effect. Scientific truth is becoming a commodity, mined by some, traded by others, and one shouldn't be particularly surprised if people are starting to "play the scientific market" in ways we once would have considered shocking.
Yes - and it starts way before that, in the infant school. 'League tables' at school begin the rat race. Discovery for its own sake seems to have been lost somewhere.
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Garden. Room. Walk
Posts: 13030 | From: Boogie Wonderland | Registered: Mar 2008
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Doc Tor
Deepest Red
# 9748
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
The relentless effort to reshape science into yet another "market economy" is thus having its effect. Scientific truth is becoming a commodity, mined by some, traded by others, and one shouldn't be particularly surprised if people are starting to "play the scientific market" in ways we once would have considered shocking.
Yes - and it starts way before that, in the infant school. 'League tables' at school begin the rat race. Discovery for its own sake seems to have been lost somewhere.
/tangent
For the last three years I've taught an 'unexamined' subject, which has basically means the Senior Management Team has no interest in what I do, as long as I don't burn the school down or kill a pupil. As a consequence, we get loads of proper science and engineering done without mucking around with Success Criteria and Learning Intentions.
Gove has turned his steely gaze upon my pride and joy, and the good times may well be ending shortly...
/tangent
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Forward the New Republic
Posts: 9131 | From: Ultima Thule | Registered: Jul 2005
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Squibs
Shipmate
# 14408
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Posted
While the same hubris is missing, I wonder if this wont go the way of the hype surrounding NASA's arsenic aliens.
Posts: 1124 | From: Here, there and everywhere | Registered: Dec 2008
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Pooks
Shipmate
# 11425
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Posted
I come across this: Tesla. So the thought that something could move faster than the speed of light is not new.
Posts: 1547 | Registered: May 2006
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nickel
Shipmate
# 8363
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Posted
Years ago I heard that what's "impossible" is accelerating from under the speed of light to over the speed of light. That leaves the possibility open for something that 'starts' over the speed of light. Not sure if that's true, or useful outside of science fiction, but it sounds plausible. It's a weird world sometimes!
Posts: 547 | From: Virginia USA | Registered: Aug 2004
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Doc Tor
Deepest Red
# 9748
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by nickel:
Years ago I heard that what's "impossible" is accelerating from under the speed of light to over the speed of light. That leaves the possibility open for something that 'starts' over the speed of light. Not sure if that's true, or useful outside of science fiction, but it sounds plausible. It's a weird world sometimes!
I always understood special relativity as to preclude objects with mass travelling at the speed of light.
Neutrinos have a non-zero mass, therefore shouldn't be able to accelerate through c. I'm not sure of the implications for anything if CERN have accidentally invented a tachyon drive...
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Forward the New Republic
Posts: 9131 | From: Ultima Thule | Registered: Jul 2005
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Schroedinger's cat
Ship's cool cat
# 64
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Posted
The basic principle is that as your speed approaches that of light, your mass will increase proportionally. What this means is that to travel at the speed of light, your mass would be infinite, if you had any mass to start with.
Also, the speed of light is a barrier to anything whatever. It becomes significant, because we travel through time at roughly the speed of light, whereas the faster you travel through normal space, the slower you travel through time - which is why time tends to get distorted. Being able to travel faster than c through space would imply travelling backwards in time.
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Blog
Music for your enjoyment
Lord may all my hard times be healing times
take out this broken heart and renew my mind.
Posts: 18859 | From: At the bottom of a deep dark well. | Registered: May 2001
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no prophet's flag is set so...
Proceed to see sea
# 15560
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Posted
What ever happened to cold fusion? I suspect this is another spectacular result that will be soon forgotten.
Posts: 11498 | From: Treaty 6 territory in the nonexistant Province of Buffalo, Canada ↄ⃝' | Registered: Mar 2010
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Schroedinger's cat
Ship's cool cat
# 64
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by no_prophet:
What ever happened to cold fusion? I suspect this is another spectacular result that will be soon forgotten.
The claim to have achieved this was disproved ( or at least, not reproduced ). But the concept is still one that is being looked into.
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Blog
Music for your enjoyment
Lord may all my hard times be healing times
take out this broken heart and renew my mind.
Posts: 18859 | From: At the bottom of a deep dark well. | Registered: May 2001
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alienfromzog
Ship's Alien
# 5327
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
The basic principle is that as your speed approaches that of light, your mass will increase proportionally. What this means is that to travel at the speed of light, your mass would be infinite, if you had any mass to start with.
Also, the speed of light is a barrier to anything whatever. It becomes significant, because we travel through time at roughly the speed of light, whereas the faster you travel through normal space, the slower you travel through time - which is why time tends to get distorted. Being able to travel faster than c through space would imply travelling backwards in time.
Nicely put.
One of the key things to understand is that the speed of light is the 'speed-limit of the universe.' Or rather C is the speed limit of the universe and it appears that light travels at that speed or indeed very close to it. It is not the speedlimit because light travels that fast, rather light travels that fast, and not faster because that is the speedlimit.
AFZ
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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
[Sen. D.P.Moynihan]
An Alien's View of Earth - my blog (or vanity exercise...)
Posts: 2150 | From: Zog, obviously! Straight past Alpha Centauri, 2nd planet on the left... | Registered: Dec 2003
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ender's Shadow:
Meanwhile the news that an Irish coroner has resorted to spontaneous combustion to explain the death of a pensioner is a useful reminder that there are still things we can't explain.
'Spontaneous' combustion is actually a quite well understood phenomenon these days, ie I've seen a documentary that explains quite well how it is possible for a person's body to burn up while leaving relatively little other sign of a fire.
As for the faster than light thing... needle got stuck.
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Technology has brought us all closer together. Turns out a lot of the people you meet as a result are complete idiots.
Posts: 18173 | From: Under | Registered: Jul 2008
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Boogie
Boogie on down!
# 13538
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Posted
Some religious people revel in unexplained new discoveries as proof of supernatural forces, demons devils and angels etc.
I just think it shows how wonderfully complex the universe is and just how little we know about it, even with our incredible scientific knowledge and advances.
Surely this is what excites and motivates scientists to find out more?
The fact that it all works so brilliantly well is what blows me away.
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Garden. Room. Walk
Posts: 13030 | From: Boogie Wonderland | Registered: Mar 2008
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ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
Like the bloke quoted in the Wired article, I'd put money on it being a systematic timing error.
Having finally caught up with what they are doing, my bet is now on a mis-estimation of the time the neutrinos are produced. You can't clock one neutrino leaving France and then the same one arriving in Italy (cos you just can't... Alan and IngoB can tell you why...and proably give different and equally true reasons for it)
So what they do is wait for an event at CERN that ought to produce lots of neutrinos as a by-product (and CERN being CERN those are quite common) and then estimate the times that they will have been made. At the other end they record a cluster of neutrinos a fraction of a second later.
So there is a statistical distribution of neutrino production. Millions are made in a tiny space of time - but it is over a period of time, not all at once. Of those millions a few get caught in the Gran Sasso. That gives you a statistical estimate of the likely average time of flight. Repeat a few thousand times and there you are.
So my non-physicists guess is that there is some skew in the timing of the neutrino release, and a few - a very few - are being produced slightly earlier than predicted.
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Ken
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
Posts: 39579 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2002
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Alan Cresswell
Mad Scientist 先生
# 31
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Posted
There's not very much "waiting for an event" going on. The neutrinos are produced in a dedicated accelerator by collisions between protons and a graphite target. This results in pions and kaons, that decay into muons and muon-neutrinos. The pions and kaons are partially focussed to generate a neutrino beam aimed at the OPERA detector in Gran Sasso, arriving approximately 3ms later.
The neutrinos are generated in a pulse, defined primarily by the duration of the proton package (10.5 us) with the decay of the kaons and pions being decidedly second order. There are muon detectors behind the hadron stop which gives the production time of the muon pulse (and hence the neutrinos). If the neutrinos all travel at the same speed you'll get a 10.5 us burst of neutrinos at the OPERA detector; if they travel at different speeds this will spread out slightly in time. The time spread in the muon detectors will be slightly wider because of some speed difference between different energy muons. Although with less than 1km between the target and the muon detectors this effect will be very small.
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Don't cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.
Posts: 32413 | From: East Kilbride (Scotland) or 福島 | Registered: May 2001
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Sioni Sais
Shipmate
# 5713
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Posted
Thanks Alan, I was wondering how anyone could say that the neutrinos arriving were those that had left!
Then again, I'm thinking about Feynman and Quantum Electro-Dynamics. Did he expound a hypothesis that a particle could cease to be at one point only to 'appear' elsewhere at the same time? Could that account for neutrinos moving faster than light?
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"He isn't Doctor Who, he's The Doctor"
(Paul Sinha, BBC)
Posts: 24276 | From: Newport, Wales | Registered: Apr 2004
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
I just think it shows how wonderfully complex the universe is and just how little we know about it, even with our incredible scientific knowledge and advances. Surely this is what excites and motivates scientists to find out more?
Naw, we are mostly into science for the booze and loose women...
I have no idea what's going on here. It is a very safe bet that some systematic (rather than statistical) error has occurred in the measurement. However, the people working on this experiment are not at all unaware that this is the safe bet, and I hence doubt that the final explanation will be particularly straightforward.
Neither am I so sure what would actually be the practical consequence of having neutrinos travel faster than light. This would require some careful re-thinking. However, merely because Special Relativity was "more true" than Newton's mechanics did not mean that horse carts suddenly moved at light speed. If there is something new to come beyond Relativity, then it will not show up in most things we observe and measure. Why? Because it has not shown up in most things we observe and measure. Nature does not change just because we gain a clue. For lots and lots of stuff, including some pretty far our stuff, Relativity "works" perfectly fine as a description. So anything new will have to reproduce all those results, as they will not suddenly vanish in a puff of smoke.
Hence this is likely an error. And if it is not, then it may be revolutionary, but it is not going to "shatter physics" in the sense many people think of this. Also I wouldn't hold my breath for warp drives...
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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Eutychus
From the edge
# 3081
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Posted
They've done it again.
Or was the result back in September merely a side-effect of this one? ![[Paranoid]](graemlins/paranoid.gif)
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Let's remember that we are to build the Kingdom of God, not drive people away - pastor Frank Pomeroy
Posts: 17944 | From: 528491 | Registered: Jul 2002
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ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460
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Posted
They set up another experiment to work out the answer in 2067 and they are trying to tell us what to build to get the right answer
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Ken
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
Posts: 39579 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2002
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Jonah the Whale
Ship's pet cetacean
# 1244
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Posted
My guess is that it's a few of the September neutrinos that just took their time. Reminds me of a joke:
The barkeeper says "we don't serve neutrinos in here".
A neutrino goes into a bar.
Posts: 2799 | From: Nether Regions | Registered: Aug 2001
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Marvin the Martian
Interplanetary
# 4360
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jonah the Whale:
The barkeeper says "we don't serve neutrinos in here".
A neutrino goes into a bar.
Damn you - I was going to post that one!
(and it's "we don't serve faster-than-light particles in here" ![[Razz]](tongue.gif) )
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Hail Gallaxhar
Posts: 30100 | From: Adrift on a sea of surreality | Registered: Apr 2003
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Imaginary Friend
Real to you
# 186
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Posted
I still want to see verification from another laboratory before I believe it.
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"We had a good team on paper. Unfortunately, the game was played on grass."
Brian Clough
Posts: 9455 | From: Left a bit... Right a bit... | Registered: May 2001
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Moo
Ship's tough old bird
# 107
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Imaginary Friend:
I still want to see verification from another laboratory before I believe it.
How many other laboratories can reproduce the experiment?
Moo
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Kerygmania host
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See you later, alligator.
Posts: 20365 | From: Alleghany Mountains of Virginia | Registered: May 2001
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Doc Tor
Deepest Red
# 9748
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Moo:
quote:
Originally posted by Imaginary Friend:
I still want to see verification from another laboratory before I believe it.
How many other laboratories can reproduce the experiment?
Moo
A couple, at least. And there are also astronomical observations: supernova-powered neutrino bursts seem to be coming in on time, despite the hundreds of thousands of light years they've travelled. You'd think if they were FTL, the discrepancies would have shown up there first.
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Forward the New Republic
Posts: 9131 | From: Ultima Thule | Registered: Jul 2005
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comet
Snowball in Hell
# 10353
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
However, merely because Special Relativity was "more true" than Newton's mechanics did not mean that horse carts suddenly moved at light speed. If there is something new to come beyond Relativity, then it will not show up in most things we observe and measure. Why? Because it has not shown up in most things we observe and measure. Nature does not change just because we gain a clue.
a very good point. I remember a few years ago hearing an announcement that scientists had disproven the Bernoulli Effect. My first thought was that thankfully the airplanes and birds all didn't know this or they would fall out of the sky.
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Evil Dragon Lady, Breaker of Men's Constitutions
"It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.” -Calvin
Posts: 17024 | From: halfway between Seduction and Peril | Registered: Sep 2005
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Honest Ron Bacardi
Shipmate
# 38
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Posted
There are supposed to be four other teams poised to check this one out - two other CERN teams, a US one and a Japanese one.
I agree that some sort of systematic error is the most likely - I think the team is on record as saying something similar. But if it turns out to be a true effect then I'm not sure it will be necessary to tear up any text books. It may be necessary to write a few new ones though.
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Anglo-Cthulhic
Posts: 4857 | From: the corridors of Pah! | Registered: May 2001
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redderfreak
Shipmate
# 15191
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Pooks:
I come across this: Tesla. So the thought that something could move faster than the speed of light is not new.
Nice one. To my simple engineering brain, I can't see why the visual appearance (by the arrival of light) should be any more significant than the sonic appearance (by the arrival of sound waves) to demonstrate reality. They are both sensory phenomena which are time and materially bound, indicative of but separate from reality. Why should the speed of light be sacrosanct, any more than the speed of sound?
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You know I just couldn't make it by myself, I'm a little too blind to see
Posts: 287 | From: Exeter | Registered: Sep 2009
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Sober Preacher's Kid
Presbymethegationalist
# 12699
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Posted
Because of Maxwell's Equations, which I spent a course learning.
Maxwell's Equations describe the interrelation of magnetism and electricity and form the basis of electrodynamics.
[url= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations]See wiki[/url]
If you assume you are operating in a vacuum, you can use Maxwell's Equations to extract the formulation c = 1/sqrt(M0E0)
M0 is the permeability of free space (to magnetic flux) and E0 is the permittivity to electric flux or charge. It proved that the speed of light is determined by electrical and magnetic constants which are normally unrelated to speed. It proved that light was an electromagnetic phenomenon and M0 and E0 describe fundamental properties of space that provide a "speed limit" for Electromagnetic phenomenon.
It works out too that there is a fundamental impedance or resistance of free space of 377 ohms/m
Einstein took that idea one step further and said that the speed of light is the fastest speed than can exist in an inertial frame of reference. Objects with mass can travel at speed up to c and c is the speed at which massless pheonomeon (EM waves) travel; Einstein asserted that c is a fundamental concept broader than electromagnetism and is binding on anything in an inertial frame of reference.
If the experiment at CERN is correct then Einstein's fundamental assertion about c in special and general relativity will be incorrect. It would means that neutrinos either cannot interact with EM phenomenon or if they do we will need a new fundamental law to describe the interaction.
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NDP Federal Convention Ottawa 2018: A random assortment of Prots and Trots.
Posts: 7646 | From: Peterborough, Upper Canada | Registered: Jun 2007
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Kaplan Corday
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# 16119
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Tortuf:
Scientists at CERN have apparently measured particles traveling faster than the speed of light
I've heard that they turned out to be people trying to get out of a Benny Hinn meeting before the collection.
Posts: 3355 | Registered: Jan 2011
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