Neutrinos: faster than light?
Scientists at CERN are astounded to report that they have recorded neutrinos that travel faster than the speed of light, long thought to be a constant that defined the upper limits possible for speed in the universe:
“We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing,” [spokesman Antionio Ereditato said…
If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a “cosmic constant” and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.
That assertion, which has withstood over a century of testing, is one of the key elements of the so-called Standard Model of physics, which attempts to describe the way the universe and everything in it works…
“I just don’t want to think of the implications,” he said. “We are scientists and work with what we know.”
Just a reminder that the science is never settled.
[ADDENDUM: Makes me think of the old limerick:
There was a young lady named Bright,
whose speed was much faster than light.
She set off one day
in a relative way,
and returned on the previous night.]
[ADDENDUM II: This seems both interesting and relevant.]
From the comments at the linked article:
This could be huge. It reminds me of the Michelson-Morley experiment in the late 19th century which disproved the existence of “ether” and indirectly led to Einstein’s theories of relativity.
Part of the Einsteinian ethos tells us that, as speed increases, so does mass. At the speed of light, mass is infinite. As one approaches the speed of light, with increasing mass, increasing energy is required to make another incremental increase in speed.
Anybody know if that’s right? I’ve heard that for years and figured that was one of the reasons for not going faster than, or up to, the speed of light.
And if one can exceed the speed of light, perhaps the connection between that and time–time travel–does not exist, either.
I wouldn’t take the report too seriously at this point. Most likely it will be found to be in error.
So, scientists aren’t too sure about the speed of light, but they know for certain that we have to eliminate fossil fuels because of global warming.
The speed of light is a fascinating concept, if time stands still when you reach the speed of light, that means that all the light around us is frozen in time. Which is very difficult to get your head around.
Aren’t neutrinos massless? Is that why they can break this rule? Though I thought I read a while back that they did have some mass, so that might be rubbish. It doesn’t seem to matter how much I read about this stuff, my understanding never increases.
Perhaps the different nature of a neutrino vs photons allows for their absolute speed to not be relative space time compression due to local mass.
in this way, light speed was never violated as an absolute, but only relative the measure with which you determine it. the photon being coupled crosses the compressed distance in light speed relative to a measure within the framework. the neutrino not being coupled is traversing the distance as an absolute.
in this way, the measures appear to be different due to how we measure. in truth if this is the way it works (in simple terms), then we have a ruler to measure space time compression due to mass.
note that i pondered a huge part of the night over this trying to find an acceptable reason that would fit into the Einstein framework easily.
the above (in simple terms) was as good as i could get in 24 hours. it also couples to a framework i worked on to explain wave particle duality as a form of space time cavitation having to do with time displacement but i cant express it here – WAY to freaky and long. The only confirmation i have of it has passed its prediction. that is the theory predicted corkscrew polarized light 10 years before they discovered it. i have the magazine in which it was published with the dated notes…
anyway… you haev to realize, and i SWEAR most researchers dont realize that they are sampling devices. or sampling devices that use sampling devices as an interface to input to their sampling device.
active structure meeting active structure has certain mathematical artifacts that come from that, which masquerade as data and are indistinguishable from data unless sampled otherwise.
in this case, an Einsteinian universe containing one atom would be a very smooth plane with a very tiny dimple.
everyone remembers the science channel and grade school explanations of Einsteins curves space time, where they show a large mass making a dimple in a plane and how this dimple curves space time. (they dont tell you how to imagine a 3d dimple where its curved from every angle/axis… 🙂 )
note that light and all matter tends to exist and follow that curved space time. all vectors are straight, and its curved space that makes things orbit and matter with mass curves the space.
to envision the neutrino in this model without violating it and only adding to its nuance, is to imagine that its so little affected by mass that it traverses the dimple well almost in a straight line.
NOTE HOW THEY DID THE MEASUREMENT
they did the measurement straight through the middle of the dimple!!!!!
mathematically speaking… if you looked at this plane from above like the bowling ball sun and baseball earth going around… or even more so a black hole which is like a fixed vortex… you can imagine a different speed MEASUREMENT depending on whether your cutting across the dimpled plane a distance from its maximum center
outside this point the speeds would seem to correlate as light and neutrinos are not traversing dimples.
why is this so?
well its staring them in the face…
ie.. MASS… if neutrinos are so little affected by mass, they are so little affected by the conditions of the dimple which is a compression and warping stretching of space time… while light which is affected by mass has to follow the curve of the space time
by considering the neutrino in this way, nothing has been violated at all.. .the neutrino and the photon are going the same speed, but not traversing the same space curve.
🙂
Richard, the interpretation that mass increases with velocity has been essentially replaced with the idea that momentum increases. Originally, physicisits wanted to keep momentum looking like
p =mv, where the relativistic form is
p = mv/ (1-v^2/c^2)^1/2
If one writes the above equation as
p= (m/(1-v^2/c^2)1/2) v and call the thing inside the parentheses the “relativistic mass” then the “mass” does indeed increase with speed, and the equation looks like its classical form. Most people today prefer to keep mass as an invariant, and interpret the first equation in terms of momentum. Pick which ever suits your fancy as the equation itself does not change.
As for the CERN announcement: interesting, but requires much more independent verification; which is exactly what the people making the announcement said. As Carl Sagan said, extordinary claims require extordinary evidence.
I am rejecting the idea of tachyons and all that…
the math of them doesn’t work, with the rest of it and technically we would have to rewrite a whole lot of what we alreay know works.
no… its simpler to imagine that each particle may not be equally bound to space time curves… why at the quark level would be a big interesting area to fool with
but its not a crisis from where i stand in that there is a simple resolution that does not violate any of the current math, but extends it
just like Einstein extends newton.. not invalidates him… this extends Einstein. Newtonian ideals break down under the special conditions of speed or huge mass… so as far as it goes, newton is right… Einstein extended this framework to special relativity.
it was in special relativity that he set forth the speed limit. but this speed limit is RELATIVE to what?
let me extend the thinking above a bit more abstractly.
if the universe is dimpled by space time (as proven a whole lot that it is), does this dimpling occur relative to something unknown? if not relative, and it cant be absolute as that would be relative a whole… then the dimple would be there, and not there at the same time
you cant get around this framework problem.
put another way… from david bowie
“watch the ripples change in size but never leave the stream”
waves are in a medium.
(even if the medium is a non medium. ie, they behave like waves in a medium that is not there. like people pretending when acting, their behaviors create the negative space to create the un-something as real as a something)
but if that medium exists in a real of phantom medium, and its space is curved, what is it curved relative to?
being inside the glass house how would you know what an outside was or the temperature or anything like that? your not separate from the reality your measuring even if your mind wants to think so, or has that odd quirk. your a part of it.
if different particles couple to different forces in different ways… the two biggest divisions being hadrons and fermions
basically half integer spin gives you mass and couples you to mass.
they like to consider them carriers of force but in my model they are a bit different.. but behave MOSTLY the same… its just now they get to that behavior is different (or explained where so far it isnt much if at all).
to the layman… fermions are solid things, and bosons are the energy things… an atom is a fermion, a photon is a boson…
where do neutrinos fit?
In physics, a Majorana fermion is a fermion which is its own anti-particle. The term is used in opposition to Dirac fermion, which describes particles that differ from their antiparticles. The concept goes back to Ettore Majorana’s 1937 discovery[1] that neutral spin-1/2 particles can be described by a real wave equation (the Majorana equation).
so its from this special state that one shouold be able to derive that the particle is not couples to the same framework as the other fermions… that its special quality gives you the missing permutation…
the uncoupled state
so my thinking that the neutrino may have some special qualities we have yet to master due to its special qualities… 🙂 is not that off.
the standard model is saved if one imagines that the neutrino does not feel the space time warping…
[and yes science fiction fans, such WOULD open the door to that weird stuff like folding space, and traversing faster than light, without violating faster than light]
by the way.. the real thing that isnt there, thats referred to as quasi particles…
reminds me of the Antigonish poem…
or science wise:
In physics, quasiparticles (and related collective excitations) are emergent phenomena that occur when a microscopically complicated system such as a solid behaves as if it contained different (fictitious) weakly interacting particles in free space. For example, as an electron travels through a semiconductor, its motion is disturbed in a complex way by its interactions with all of the other electrons and nuclei; however it approximately behaves like an electron with a different mass traveling unperturbed through free space. This “electron” with a different mass is called an “electron quasiparticle”.[1] In an even more surprising example, the aggregate motion of electrons in the valence band of a semiconductor is the same as if the semiconductor contained instead positively-charged quasiparticles called holes. Other quasiparticles or collective excitations include phonons (particles derived from the vibrations of atoms in a solid), plasmons (particles derived from plasma oscillations), and many others.
“Just a reminder that the science is never settled.”
Aaaaaaaa……MEN.
a neutrino being its own antiparticle, may not annihilate
it may oscillate between being there, and not being there as it travels, and so uncouples to mass
we dont know really what such a particle does when it does…
the outward effect of this may be decoupling
not possible?
Majorana fermions in superconductors could be used as a building block for a topological quantum computer, in view of their non-Abelian anyonic statistics
you see, a tachyon (which i reject as a separate particle that always moves at this speed), may be a neutrino crossing a gravity well…
what if such particles wear two hats?
ie… when not traversing a well, they APPEAR to follow the same rules as light and so the measurements seem the same…
[ergo speed from the sun would be FROM the well center to the outside, and so would not be faster. ONLY when you cross a well would the behavior show itself]
but when traversing a well/dimple they are not coupled and so seem to be faster than light (when measured using space time compressed matter)…
the reason they could not detect faster than light particles and declare finding any, is that they are not ALWAYS faster than light, they are faster than light when measured in a gravity well they traverse.
in open normal space, there is no well to traverse and so they dont seem to violate.
we have no measuring tools that are immune to space time compression due to mass…
physicsguy
Thanks for the explanation. But I fear you are operating under a handicap.
Back in the day, when I studied anthro, we heard of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. That was before the name was acquired by the Romulans.
The assertion was that, due to the structure of their language, any Hopi kid could understand the theory of relativity. I have no idea if this is true or not, not understanding either, but the point was that language structure can affect our perceptions or our thinking or something and that whitemaleenglish was, naturally, deficient compared to the wonderfully wonderful language of the Native Americans.
Amazing what you learn in college.
SciFi author Poul Anderson had a book about a spaceship whose conflusticator ran away. It was a genuine throttle issue, not like pedal missapplication in the Toyotas. They got so close to the speed of light that millions of centuries passed in one of their days and their mass was such that they would destroy clusters of galaxies just by blowing through them.
I think they got it stopped, somehow.
Always liked that one.
The neutrinos in Italy are never on time.
/stolen from PJ comment thread
Richard, why not just start with an improbability drive?
and convince cows that they should want to be eaten?
perhaps we all could get a hitchikers thumb and search the galaxy escaping Vogon poetry.
oh to visit Viltvodle VI and Jatravartids playing practical jokes by blowing our noses…
sigh…
anyone realize that the liberals have similar ideas to the Golgafrincham?
and just so you get the recipe correct richard here it is
“Take the juice from one bottle of that Ol’ Janx Spirit.
Pour into it one measure of water from the seas of Santraginus V
Allow three cubes of Arcturan Mega-gin to melt into the mixture (it must be properly iced or the benzene is lost).
Allow four litres of Fallian marsh gas to bubble through it (in memory of all those happy Hikers who have died of pleasure in the Marshes of Fallia).
Over the back of a silver spoon float a measure of Qualactin Hypermint extract, redolent of all the heady odours of the dark Qualactin Zones.
Drop in the tooth of an Algolian Suntiger. Watch it dissolve, spreading the fires of the Algolian suns deep into the heart of the drink.
Sprinkle Zamphour.
Add an olive.
Drink…but very carefully.”
whats it like?
kind of like “having your brain smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.”
I hear Zaphod shared one with Obama…
odd how his name fits the story… 🙂
“Just a reminder that the science is never settled.”
Now, what are you a denier or something. We all know the science of Anthropogenic Global Warming is settled.
“Just a reminder that the science is never settled.”
Absolutely. Anyone asserting (or even implying) otherwise is not a scientist. If Newtonian mechanics can be overthrown, anything can be ovethrown.
Roll over Einstein: Law of physics challenged (Update 3)
http://www.physorg.com/print235921802.html
Having said that, I’m with physicsguy: this is interesting, but I wouldn’t chisel it into stone just yet. It’s a pretty good bet that there’s a mis-calibrated oscilloscope (I’m dating myself here) or something that will occasion a sheepish press conference in a few weeks.
Recall the “arsenic-based life forms” splash of a few months ago, which has now sunk without trace.
Newton was extended, not overthrown…
Real science correlates with past knowns and why…
no one will throw out relativity, it works.
but they will refine, extend and so forth…
i believe this is one of those moments, and that one needs not do much to actually get it to continue… they just need to stop for a second and realize that they live in a gravity well, and so there are two supposition paths paths between points.. the mass bent one created by gravity wells, and the unbent one across the well…
BOTH have to exist at the same time or space wont work or exist right…
to put it this way… if its bent, bent from what reference? without the suppositional, there is no such reference, and so, you perceive it the way we do, with it resolved to a gravity well… but since its suppositional, a particle that does not percieve the well, just passes over/through it…
like jumping over a hole…
the split comes from having two detectors at each side of the well… a photon goes in one, and it goes into the hole and based on the distance IN the well, its going the speed of light when it hits the other detector
the neutrino though enters the first detector, and rather than follow the hole, it goes across it as if its a flat plane, its frame of reference is the other suppositional state…
if you add another detector, but unlike the 12 oclock 6 oclock you put it at three oclock… you should be able to detect the difference if i am right.
the line between 6 and 3 will be much less warped compared to the line from 6 to 12… which would be maximum…
its interesting that they can already to this to confirm this if they can do it to find it.
ie. they only have to try it to see…
capn rusty—
+250k (millions and billions)
Bullshit. After many thousands experiments which proved special relativity, one experiment with opposing result can be safely discarded. It was flawed. I do not know why exactly, but I know that much. Special relativity is not simply an experimental or observational fact, it is a logical necessity, the only way to reconcile electromagnetism and causality principle.
Single experiment means nothing in science. Only reproducible results are meaningfull. And they must be reproduced by other, independent researchers and laboratories. Only then they are considered seriously. And if they contradict established theory, this does not mean yet that this theory is debunked. Scientists look how to reconcile it with theory, sometimes for decades. If such a way is not found, it became a curiosity, to solve later, and often simply forgotten. Scientists are very conservative guys, they do not change their opinions without overwhelming necessity to do so.
Newton was extended, not overthrown…
Yes, strictly speaking, that’s true. But in terms of the impact – namely, showing that Newtonian mechanics did not describe some physical situations, that showing overthrew three centuries of dogma.
But, yes, you’re right.
When we have a FTL capable ship that can transport hundreds of thousands of humans, do we decide to voyage to another planet or should we instead pack all the politicians and other evil doers into the ship and send them into exile into the Deep Blackness?
I wonder what A Physicist thinks about this?
As a physics guy myself who’s participated in a few of these experiments, I’m guessing experimental error. The time difference I saw reported was a few nanoseconds. The speed of light in vacuum is one foot per nanosecond. The experiment is 732 km =2.4 million feet from the accelerator. All it takes is mismeasuring the distance between the two by a few feet to get a false result.
Precision measurment is the hardest part of experimental physics, the most prone to errors. Such measurments should be always taken with a huge grain of salt. And special relativity is the most solid part of theoretical physics. The very accelerator used was built using SR formulas, it is a relativistic machine. They simply can not be built without taking these formulas as the basis of any calculation involved, to the very high standard of precision.
@Richard Aubrey – Have you ever read “Stories of Your Life” by Ted Chiang? It’s a science fiction story about a linguist working with visiting aliens to understand their language. Once she mastered it, she could see the events in her life before she lived them. It was a very touching story with a side of linguistics and physics.
LisaM
Sounds like a premise that could be worked into something quite good.
Sort of like the opposite of “slow glass”. There were two or three shorts on that subject decades ago.
Slow glass is a transparent substance through which light passes very, very slowly. So, if you have it in your front window, you can see your wife and kids coming up the front walk, last year. And the next day, and the next. Considering they were killed in an auto accident a month ago, this could be rough.
Other uses of the concept, which I don’t recall.
But the premise you describe would have to be used better than in forecasting the results of bangtail bingo.
Actually, this “discovery” only highlights how firmly THIS science is established, if a deviation of a measurment of an empirical constant from its previously known value by 0.01% can be called a sensation. If only climatology could boast this level of precision!
Richard, your post about the Hopi language and the theory of relativity reminded me of this story. Spoiler alert for anyone who might read it ————— The linguist is a single woman while she is learning the alien language. During this time, she falls in love and marries a man on the project with her. One night he suggests they get pregnant. In that instant, she can see her future daughter’s life, her husband’s future infidelity and their divorce. She can also see she and her future ex identifying their daughter’s 21-year old body in the morgue after a mountain-climbing accident. We don’t learn all of this at once. The theme of the story is predestination vs. free will, and her decision to go through with it all anyway. I continue to marvel that Chiang, a young single guy, so accurately captured the emotions of motherhood.
Sergey… you know that climate can NEVER be that close as they are working with two major problems (and a few thousand others) that they pretend dont exist… the lack of infinite decimal places in simulation smachines, and the lack of infinite decimal places in measuring starting conditions…
and if your making your ‘squares’ in your cellular automata simulation 450 kilometers on a side, starting conditions are impossible… and an average wont do.
despite the work in math from 1980s, these guys plink along with really aweful simulations (they are so bad i wouldnt call them that) and a completly eronous basis for their work (if we get the numbers aligned and it matches reality for a while, we discovered the math formuleas. sorry, there are an infinite number of almosts arranged around the one actuality)
sigh
Lisa M.
Interesting thesis. Can the future she sees be changed by her actions taken upon seeing it, or is that calculated in the future pix?
For getting into people’s heads, I like Zenna Henderson.
Whatever art-the-f says I take the square root of, cube the result, take the sine of, multiply by -1, and then delete….
Sorry, real science wins every time.
Good XKCD cartoon:
http://xkcd.com/955/
Ah, I love me this scientific debate here that reminds me so much of a recent thread about the Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) threat on Pajamas Media:
Wherein X claims to be a professor of physics and declares the article to be alarmist male bovine droppings meant to serve an agenda for which there is not the slightest shred of evidence, and true science shows an EMP could never wreak the havoc attributed to it;
Whereupon Y chimes in, claiming too to be a professor and castigating X for being fraudulent; the former’s claims, says he, are based on poor if not deceptive methodology, and all truly true science shows the article on the EMP threat is right on target.
Repeat ad nauseum. Vary the theme on Global Warming, Evolution/Creation, 9/11, you name it. Final result of recipe: General public mistrust of science exactly as Feyerabend warned it would be, because of the replacement of “Thus it is written in Scripture” by “The Science is settled” in our day. Houston, we have a problem!
Neo…
Your link points to bad math
E=mc^2 Period. The m being rest mass.
E=mv^2/sqrt( 1-V^2/C^2) The m being rest mass.
THAT’S the equation the poster is supposed to have used.
As you can see as velocity ==> the speed of light their squares approach unity — which then causes 1-near unity to become a fantastically small number.
In a CERN type accelerator it is actually possible to pump more energy into a particle that its rest mass via this equation. When this occurs weird physics is possible: an alphabet soup of particle generation.
I lose interest pretty quickly when such a HUGE math boner stays uncorrected on the Internet.
CERN has to watch out for clock errors. I suspect that at the frequencies they are dealing with they’ve been tripped up by wave effects in their readout from their clocks.
( At the time scale required the clocking has to be done via the electromagnetic spectrum — and there are any number of wave effects that will CHRONICALLY ( no pun intended ) cause you to skew observations.
With 16,000 events — this is the source of their time machine. It’ll be all over the news in a short time ( no pun intended ) just wait for it.)
Superluminal neutrinos – a case study in how good science is done
Neo, I wish I’d seen that link while the thread was active.