56 replies to this topic

[Craven]

That's actually nice idea, that could bring happiness back to world of physics
Incredible that this slight diffrences could affect measurements. But same could be said about GPS, yet if not for relativistic corrections...

They mention depth of each facility, but let's not forget gravitational anomalies in Earth. Also muon neutrinos are heavier, so whatever gravitional impact there is it may be stronger than in case of photon for example. But it's about clocks... So nevermind.

Anyway interesting news!

Prolite, on 06 October 2011 - 06:43 PM, said:

The problem with your hypothesis is that you're applying ordinary known physics to the quantum world. There ARE no known mathematics to solve problems in the quantum world. Michio Kaku has said this numerous times.

Not really. Lorentz transformation applies pretty well to particles. It let us explain strange behavior of muons in 70s.

[Eonist1]

It's been a couple weeks since I heard about the neutrinos and just like the whole scientific community, I am skeptical about FTL.
It just doesn't fit into natural equations. Every technology that uses special relativity, like GPS, works perfectly. If the great "c" wasn't a cosmic constant the cosmos would collapse into mathematical chaos.

Now what could that be except for a computational/machinery error (although they checked it thousands of times, so it really isn't a flaw) which is the most common interpretation of this surprising outcome? There are a few hypothetical situations that might have occurred.

The energy produced in OPERA experiment was high enough to accelerate Mu-neutrinos to high energy states. Now since neutrinos are very light and weakly interacting and we know little about their true nature they might somehow interact with the quantum foam itself. The quantum foam bubbles at very short low-energy fluctuations from the vacuum energy that is transferred to virtual particles for a fraction of a second and then decays back. Even micro black holes can be created in such process. Now let's say that the fluctuations could occasionaly create tiny wormholes. Since the neutrinos had high energy they could enter some wormholes before they decay and slip through the other end. Therefore flying through a shortcut through space and time... but that's kind of problematic

Another thing is that these little particles fly everywhere. There were neutrino detections from supernova explosions. Neutrinos are exploited into the space by our own sun in gargantuan quantities and they're moving almost at the speed of light and pass through matter without interaction. The detector down there could have detected some other particles that those created in the collision.

If in fact the OPERA was not a mistake at all, it would mean that there's something in physics that we don't know. It's covered with a thick layer of unanswered questions and very complicated research with very little affordable technology. So I hope we'll find out what really happened.

Feel free to post any hypothetical suggestions to what could cause the neutrinos to arrive before the radiation from the decay.

[Craven]

http://www.futuretim...han-light-cern/

To be precise: http://www.nature.co...s.2011.575.html pretty interesting explanation. I guess they'll have to check the numbers, if gravity effects match those 60 ns.

[Logically Irrational]

http://www.voanews.c...-131391688.html

[Logically Irrational]

This looks like the explanation a lot of people are settling on:

http://www.technolog...og/arxiv/27260/

[Time_Traveller]

Quote

Scientists who announced that sub-atomic particles might be able to travel faster than light are to rerun their experiment in a different way.

From http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-15471118

Well here comes the re-run of the experiement again.

[wjfox]

^ I've merged your thread with the previous one.

[Shimmy]

http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-15791236
http://www.guardian....t?newsfeed=true

And to think, when I told people this 10 years ago they all thought I was crazy. Who's crazy now.

[Craven]

Still it's CERN, so I'm predicting some kind of systematic error. Too early to scrap relativity

[GNR Rvolution]

I guess we will have to wait until this test can be reproduced elsewhere before we have definitive poof of anything. But these people know what they are saying, and are very worried about the impact on science. If they really thought this could be down to instrumentation error or anything else I think that they would hold back, but the fact that they have retested in tighter conditions and got the same result suggests that this isn't some fluke...

[Caiman]

Craven, on 18 November 2011 - 01:00 PM, said:

Still it's CERN, so I'm predicting some kind of systematic error. Too early to scrap relativity

Even if this result is proven correct we’ll no more scrap relativity than we did Newtonian mechanics. It will still have tremendous uses. The FTL neutrino will just mean it was incomplete and open up a new physics.

[classical piano guy]

http://www.science20...ter_light-84763

[Craven]

http://www.reuters.c...ame=scienceNews

Study rejects "faster than light" particle finding


They argue, on the basis of recently published studies by two top U.S. physicists, that the neutrinos pumped down from CERN, near Geneva, should have lost most of their energy if they had travelled at even a tiny fraction faster than light.

But in fact, the ICARUS scientists say, the neutrino beam as tested in their equipment registered an energy spectrum fully corresponding with what it should be for particles traveling at the speed of light and no more.

Physicist Tomasso Dorigo, who works at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and the U.S. Fermilab near Chicago, said in a post on the website Scientific Blogging that the ICARUS paper was "very simple and definitive."

It says, he wrote, "that the difference between the speed of neutrinos and the speed of light cannot be as large as that seen by OPERA, and is certainly smaller than that by three orders of magnitude, and compatible with zero."

[wjfox]

Bummer: Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos Weren't, and It Was the Cable Guy's Fault

By Rebecca Boyle
Posted 02.22.2012

Apparently neutrinos are not moving faster than light after all — some of the brightest minds in modern physics were bamboozled by a loose wire.

Read more - http://www.popsci.co...-fault?cmpid=tw

[Craven]

No surprise, just embarassing reason behind whole thing.

[Logically Irrational]

I was afraid it would turn out like this. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

[shane_allen]

Now my physics proffesor can't tell his neutrino joke anymore:

The bartender yells, "Hey we don't serve faster then light neutrinos in here!"
It says to the bartender, "I'll take a Hieniken."
A neutrino walks into a bar and sits down.

Edited by shane_allen, 22 February 2012 - 11:08 PM.