CERN Discover Faster-Than-Light Particle

[RRW]

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011...d.html?_r=1&hp

GENEVA (AP) — Physicists on the team that measured particles traveling faster than light said Friday they were as surprised as their skeptics about the results, which appear to violate the laws of nature as we know them.

Hundreds of scientists packed an auditorium at one of the world's foremost laboratories on the Swiss-French border to hear how a subatomic particle, the neutrino, was found to have outrun light and confounded the theories of Albert Einstein.

"To our great surprise we found an anomaly," said Antonio Ereditato, who participated in the experiment and speaks on behalf of the team.

An anomaly is a mild way of putting it.

Going faster than light is something that is just not supposed to happen, according to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity. The speed of light — 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second) — has long been considered a cosmic speed limit.

The team — a collaboration between France's National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research and Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory — fired a neutrino beam 454 miles (730 kilometers) underground from Geneva to Italy.

They found it traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than light. That's sixty billionth of a second, a time no human brain could register.

"You could say it's peanuts, but it's not. It's something that we can measure rather accurately with a small uncertainty," Ereditato told The Associated Press.

If the experiment is independently repeated — most likely by teams in the United States or Japan — then it would require a fundamental rethink of modern physics.

"Everybody knows that the speed limit is c, the speed of light. And if you find some matter particle such as the neutrino going faster than light, this is something which immediately shocks everybody, including us," said Ereditato, a researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

Physicists not involved in the experiment have been understandably skeptical.

Alvaro De Rujula, a theoretical physicist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside Geneva from where the neutron beam was fired, said he blamed the readings on a so-far undetected human error.

If not, and it's a big if, the door would be opened to some wild possibilities.

The average person, said De Rujula, "could, in principle, travel to the past and kill their mother before they were born."

But Ereditato and his team are wary of letting such science fiction story lines keep them up at night.

"We will continue our studies and we will wait patiently for the confirmation," he told the AP. "Everybody is free to do what they want: to think, to claim, to dream."

He added: "I'm not going to tell you my dreams."

does this mean Stein;gate actually real

[Vexx]

The thread title is misleading -- Physicists MAY HAVE discovered SOME PARTICLES can move faster than light UNDER THE RIGHT CONDITIONS. They are trying to make sure they haven't made a mistake in the set up or missed some extenuating issue.

The average person, said De Rujula, "could, in principle, travel to the past and kill their mother before they were born."

That bit of article speculation depends purely on whether macroscopic objects could move backwards in time, it also depends on the interpretation of quantum mechanics actually holds (many-worlds theory.... you could go back and kill "your mother" but you then eliminate the timeline you came from and you're now part of the timeline you altered.... or two or three other versions).

This story is already being discussed in the NEWS STORIES thread.

[Tri-ring]

Moving a certain distance within a certain time does not automatically mean it exceeded the speed of light violating Einstein's special relativity theory. Although a more stranger event, the neutrino particles may have manipulated dimensional/gravitational effect achieving "Warp" which does not violate special relativity theory and was even predicted within general theory of relativity.
For example, IF neutrino particles is not affected by gravity then theoretically distance between the two points will become shorter compensating the warping effect of earth gravity.

[Kyero Fox]

Boring, limme know when we got a damn Star Gate.... Then i'd be surpised XD

[Xagzan]

Originally Posted by Tri-ring

Moving a certain distance within a certain time does not automatically mean it exceeded the speed of light violating Einstein's special relativity theory. Although a more stranger event, the neutrino particles may have manipulated dimensional/gravitational effect achieving "Warp" which does not violate special relativity theory and was even predicted within general theory of relativity.
For example, IF neutrino particles is not affected by gravity then theoretically distance between the two points will become shorter compensating the warping effect of earth gravity.

Sounds like Mass Effect

...

Sorry, I never studied physics

[Knightrunner]

lol My physics teacher mentioned this to my class yesterday. For some reason she has grudge against Einstein's theory about relativity.

[Aqua Knight]

That is just totally awesome, especially after a certain show

[felix]

I agree with Tri. It's much more likely to assume at this point (assuming it wasn't an error to begin with) that the particles traveled though some warp mechanism (ie. they didn't travel faster then the speed of light, space bend and moved around them). From a observer's point of view, the same results should show up. This warp-drive has been theorized almost at the same time Einstein proposed his theory, so it's nothing new... it technically should work.

Of course this is assuming this result isn't just hot air.

[Random32]

Thank you for raining on my parade Tri. I was about to decide whether to throw relativity or casualty out the window.

Tri, what do you think about other possibilities. I was looking around in Wikipedia and

In 1985 it was proposed by Chodos et al. that neutrinos can have a tachyonic nature. Today, the possibility of having standard particles moving at superluminal speeds is a natural consequence of unconventional dispersion relations that appear in the Standard-Model Extension, a realistic description of the possible violation of Lorentz invariance in field theory. In this framework, neutrinos experience Lorentz-violating oscillations and can travel faster than light at high energies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino#Speed

I'm not much of a physics person, and the papers it references are a bit confusing. Would these theories explain the faster than light neutrinos at CERN?

Originally Posted by RRW

does this mean Stein;gate actually real

I'll try to perform the same experiment in my microwave. Also, Buying: IBM 5100.

[felix]

Originally Posted by Random32

I'll try to perform the same experiment in my microwave. Also, Buying: IBM 5100.

Already way ahead of you, put a banana and two nuts in it... nothing happened. I'm so jelly of CERN now.

Obviously I'll need to stick my nuts into the particle accelerator to achieve time travel! >:D

[Kusa-San]

Originally Posted by Knightrunner

lol My physics teacher mentioned this to my class yesterday. For some reason she has grudge against Einstein's theory about relativity.

Probably because many people think that Einstein's theory is a fact when it's not the case and there are other theory. We don't even know if the dark matter really exist or not and there is a scientist who discovered that Einstein's theory doesn't work with some galaxy.

For some people, it's even the Newton's theory about the gravity which is not correct.

The main problem is that most of the scientist are working with the Einstein's theory.

[Jinto]

Uhm, well Einsteins theory seems to be a valid model if the context where it actually applies is carefully defined. In that regard Einstein's theory is certainly not outright wrong, just not complete... or well defined in its limits of application.

[felix]

Originally Posted by Kusa-San

Probably because many people think that Einstein's theory is a fact when it's not the case and there are other theory. We don't even know if the dark matter really exist or not and there is a scientist who discovered that Einstein's theory doesn't work with some galaxy.

What you mean the whole cold/warm dark matter nonsense?

[Vexx]

Many of you keep using the word "wrong" ... in a wrong way

A theory or model is perfectly correct for the regimes it had been tested under. Newton's models were just fine until we started observing velocities and forces outside of Newton's available observations. We still use Newton for most orbital mechanic flight navigation and earth engineering. It is correct for velocities well below lightspeed and for non-extreme gravities.
Einstein and the quantum mechanics crowd added models that explain regimes way outside the average human's daily experience where Newton's equations start failing to match up with the experimental data.
Many scientists are starting to think there isn't "one grand theory" so much as a patchwork of theories (m-theory) that will eventually handle all the situations we encounter. I kind of think that's a form of "giving up" but so far we've been unable to fully integrate the models we use to predict world behavior at the very small and the very large.

And, technically, no model of any kind is ever "fact" or "Reality" -- its always going to be the best guess for what is going on "out there outside of our heads". The keyboard you think you're typing on, is simply your brain's interpretation ("model") based on various sensory inputs. You're using a mental model ... which you might have to update or discard if your keyboard bites your fingers off one day.

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by Random32

Thank you for raining on my parade Tri. I was about to decide whether to throw relativity or casualty out the window.

Tri, what do you think about other possibilities. I was looking around in Wikipedia and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino#Speed

I'm not much of a physics person, and the papers it references are a bit confusing. Would these theories explain the faster than light neutrinos at CERN?

The theory was already mentioned very much earlier. In fact, possibly even much earlier through Stueckelburg (his diagram were further improved by an eccentric guy named Feynman) when he first proposed that positrons (the opposite of electrons) were travelling backward in time - he was thinking that since positrons were opposite of electrons, technically it should also be opposite too as philosophically time could be a vector instead of a scalar. *

Actually, the faster than speed of light = travelling back in time effect is more towards an idea of that time is slower relatively from the particle's point of view (time passes slower), therefore, it was frozen in a position in time while the rest of us moved forward. Relativity STILL COUNTS, it is just that the "light barrier" was broken.

* - I propose that if this theory is valid, the effect in which the particle changes shape to a bullet through travelling faster than the speed of light should be called the Danmaku Effect.

[Marcus H.]

So we have far breached the Aeon of Newton, and the Aeon of Einstein is close to becoming obsolete (well, not really obsolete, just no longer the upper echelon of physics). I wonder what Aeon will emerge...

(I hope someone gets the references. )

[Stiletto]

El. Psy. Congroo.

But in all honesty, this has me quite interested. Partly the coincidence and partly because of everything I know about physics being put into doubt.

[RRW]

Originally Posted by Stiletto

El. Psy. Congroo.

But in all honesty, this has me quite interested. Partly the coincidence and partly because of everything I know about physics being put into doubt.

yeah that the beauty (or the horor) of science.

just few information

it seem it's not the first one this is happening. 2007 in fermilab the do similar experiment and found faster than light neutrinos. howver the differce is small so the thought of anomaly

it seem they will repeat same result in 2012 (will this be end of the world that maya predict? )

[Lord of Fire]

Originally Posted by Stiletto

El. Psy. Congroo.

But in all honesty, this has me quite interested. Partly the coincidence and partly because of everything I know about physics being put into doubt.

I doubt that will happen. It will only effect the quantum mechanics of our known universe, and that is a subject that even Einstein himself couldn't tackle properly. He had enough trouble with the duality of light as it is, that he introduced the photon particle to try and explain why light behaves as both a wave ad a particle. Nowadays, it's largely assumed that this is correct, but we're not 100% sure that it is indeed so (though that is pretty much impossible anyway).

[Tri-ring]

Originally Posted by Lord of Fire

I doubt that will happen. It will only effect the quantum mechanics of our known universe, and that is a subject that even Einstein himself couldn't tackle properly. He had enough trouble with the duality of light as it is, that he introduced the photon particle to try and explain why light behaves as both a wave ad a particle. Nowadays, it's largely assumed that this is correct, but we're not 100% sure that it is indeed so (though that is pretty much impossible anyway).

No I assure you Einstein was quite right in postulating in light being both particle and wave.
As for this enigma if proven true and if neutrinos are not manipulating dimensional space then it will truly redefine our understanding of matter and mass as we know it and not just the confinement of quantum mechanics since it goes against Einstein's special relativity theory postulating that any mass cannot reach light speed due to Inertia and momentum where an object's speed approaches the speed of light from an observer's point of view, its mass appears to increase thereby making it more and more difficult to accelerate it from within the observer's frame of reference and at c, mass becomes infinite there by making it impossible to go beyond the speed of light within our known spacetime.

Another possibility is that this finding may hold the key to the illusive Grand Unified Theory in which physics still have not been able to unify gravity with electromagnetism.