CERN Experiment Indicates Faster-Than-Light neutrinos

[ranqe]

what does c in e=mc2 stand for again? i forgot

[Vezon Dash]

what does c in e=mc2 stand for again? i forgot

 

C is the speed of light being used as the terminal speed of all objects.

[pal2002]

Poor Einstein - and poor me for just having taken relativity - and now that's proved to be totally wrong if this actually turns out to be true.

 

Still in for the Europeans making stupid mistake somewhere and result can't be replicated elsewhere.

[i_love_burritos]

Just so you all realize, this is a huge claim, which requires some very very hard evidence. (why most scientists are taking the side of skepticism right now)

 

Here's the paper if anyone feels like wading through it. General and Special relativity have been PROVEN for the last 100 years to be empirically true, and Einstein's theories aren't just going to be invalidated with this result. Understand that if a particle did happen to travel faster than the speed of light, it be a quantum (hurrrr) shift in current model of physics. Newtonian physics wasn't laid to waste over a period of 20 years when Einstein developed special and general relativity, it's just that it literally changed our way of thinking about the universe.

 

The current position that the CERN scientists have taken (from what I've read) is "uhhh we don't know what the [bleep] to think about this, everyone here? yeah let's just talk." They use GPS satellites to get somewhat accurate measurement - however got a 10ns error. Found that the neutrinos were travelling about ~0.0025% faster and got a 6sigma standard deviation. That's a +/- 0.0004% error. Most likely a "systematic error".

 

If it was an accurate result then, physicists are going to be studying this for generations. (The project took 3 years, they're not going to replicate it so easy.)

 

Also, c is a hard limit, meaning that either (particles can go faster than the speed of light and light is being impeded by something - ridiculous). Also look at :

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MichelsonMorley_experiment

[RpgGamer]

nifty. But....why would it pose such a problem according to the one quote?

[i_love_burritos]

Why is it such a problem ? Well, [cabbage]. I can't really answer that, but imagine if you had a rule known to be true (through many trials and observations) and then you found an exception to that rule.

 

Wouldn't be a "rule" any more really. Why this is a problem...

 

The Special and General Theories of Relativity (I stole this from google)

[hide]

Einstein published his special theory in 1905 and his general theory in 1916. The special theory applies when no accelerations are involved and its effects become noticeable near the speed of light. The general theory applies when accelerations are involved and in the presence of strong gravitational fields. It explains gravity in terms of the curvature of four dimensional space-time.

 

Principle of Equivalence

General relativity is based on the principle of equivalence. The two statements of this principle are logically equivalent; either statement can be used to prove the other.

 

One statement relates to the concept of mass. Mass enters into Newton's second law, which states that the force needed to accelerate an object is proportional to its mass. This mass, the object's resistance to changing its velocity, is the inertial mass. Mass also enters into Newton's law of gravity. The gravitational force acting between two objects is proportional to their masses. This mass is the gravitational mass.

 

Is the inertial mass the same as the gravitational mass? Newton assumed that they were. Considering the question before concluding that they were, led Einstein to the general theory. The principle of equivalence states that the inertial mass equals the gravitational mass.

 

From this statement, it is possible to prove the other statement of this principle: Inertial forces are indistinguishable from gravitational forces. An inertial force is the apparent force felt when in an accelerating reference frame. When a car accelerates, the occupants feel pushed back into their seats. No real force is pushing them, but the car they are sitting in, their reference frame, is accelerating. So they feel an apparent inertial force pushing them back into their seats. The principle of equivalence states that it is not possible to distinguish between inertial forces and gravitational forces.

 

Light Affected by Gravity

Using the principle of equivalence, Einstein was able to show that light is affected by gravitational forces. To understand Einstein's reasoning, consider two enclosed rooms. One is at rest on the Earth's surface; the other is in space far from any gravitational forces but accelerating at exactly the same rate objects fall near Earth's surface. On Earth, the Earth's gravity causes objects to fall and have weight. In the accelerating room, objects will also fall and apparently have weight because the room is accelerating. It is an accelerating reference frame, so objects in the room experience an inertial force. From the principle of equivalence, it is impossible to distinguish between the gravitational force acting on objects in the room on Earth and the inertial force acting on objects in the accelerating room in space.

 

READ THIS NEXT

 

The Problem of Quantum Gravity

Newton's Mechanics, Modern Physics, and the Scientific Method

 

Consider a light beam shining across the accelerating room. Because the room is accelerating the light beam will strike the opposite wall slightly lower than its starting level. Inertial forces acts on the light beam. Because they are not distinguishable from gravitational forces the light beam should experience exactly the same effect in the room near Earth's surface. A gravitational force affects a light beam just as an inertial force does.

 

Geometric Nature of Gravity

 

Light has no mass, so Newtonian gravity predicts light is not affected by gravity. However Einstein concluded that light is affected by gravity and derived a new theory of gravity.

 

Einstein visualized gravity as a manifestation of the curvature of space-time - the three space dimensions and a fourth time dimension. Most of us cannot visualize a curvature of four dimensional space-time, so visualize a curved two dimensional rubber sheet. Placing a mass on the rubber sheet curves it downward like space-time curves in the presence of a mass. On such a rubber sheet a small mass can circle around the curvature produced by a large mass, just as planets orbit the Sun. Or a mass can roll straight downward just as an object falls to the Earth.

 

Einstein explained gravity as a result of the curvature of space-time near the presence of a mass. The differences between general relativity and Newton's law of gravity only become noticeable when the gravitational force is very strong.

 

Einstein's general theory of relativity is one of the crowning intellectual achievements of the 20th century and led to such predictions as black holes, gravitational lenses, and the expanding universe. So far it has passed every experimental test with flying colors.[/hide]

 

If you read all that, it states that :

 

1.) The laws of physics are the same for all non-accelerating observers.

2.) The speed of light in vacuum is independent of the motion of all observers and sources, and is observed to have the same value.

 

If you found something that can go faster than light it would violate the theory of relativity. Then you go into all types of scenarios with particles that have imaginary mass, can go backwards in time etc etc etc. I'm not too sure of the details but essentially it'd be a headache for everyone. I'll have to do more reading.

 

The talk is here : http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1384486?ln=en.

 

EDIT:

 

From my last post, add in a couple of zeros behind the error margin. The people working on that OPERA project apparently have checked/ rechecked and examined every real source of a possible error and still get a 6 sigma significance value. (The chance that their results are wrong are about 6 standard deviations away from the expected, i.e. it's about a 1 in billion chance that they've done something wrong - which is why they're asking other physicists now. Looks like it might actually be valid.)

 

Also in the paper they said the fired around 16,000 neutrinos (16,000 events, with around 10^20 proton events) to try and eliminate any STATISTICAL error. Since these are really small, really fast, particles it's quite hard to measure each individually so they're using a statistical method - a probability density function of a distribution of events (i.e. the neutrinos arriving at a point, in a certain amount of time. Note the blind calibrations.)

 

They've even attempted to separate the arrival of the neutrinos based on their energy dependence (high vs low) and haven't found any difference haha. (All the things I've said come from page 3 and 7, figures 4, 8, 13 and table 2.)

 

also, tl;dr speed of light tied up with many other constants such as the passage of time, the concept of time and space itself.

[Dheginsea]

Been waiting for ever for something like this to happen, always hated how light was #1.

 

Still I won't believe it until there is nothing reasonable that could account for the findings other than they go faster then the speed of light.

[kamykazee]

Modern measurements of the speed of light are accurate to much less than 1 m/s. The size of the discrepancy is large, not small. That said, the first place to look is errors in the apparatus, but it must be subtle or it would have been detected already. The fact is that if we leave aside the systematic error as the most likely cause of this, this is the point where the search must be and surely will be centered by serious theorists long time before they even seriously consider something's wrong with relativity. (the media is a different matter, all newpapers I've seen have already decided "Einstein was wrong").

 

Here is one persons's thoughts on why the result is incorrect and how CERN made an embarassing mistake http://johncostella.webs.com/neutrino-blunder.pdf

 

In short, it's conclusion is :

 

From the above, the OPERA result becomes 61 ns with a statistical uncertainty of 24 ns and a systematic uncertainty of 7 ns. Even if we were to take the systematic uncertainty to be accurate, this result is now within two standard errors, which disqualifies it as a “discovery”, rendering it simply “an interesting result”. Given the much tighter bounds that we have on the neutrino speed from other sources such as Supernova 1987A, one must conclude that OPERA has simply made a mistake, albeit a highly embarrassing one which has gathered international media coverage today.

 

Now that's just one persons's thoughts on it and it may very well be wrong, but still it's nice to finally have some opinions on where the error is.

[Nomrombom]

For all those doubting the results - do you honestly think CERN doesn't test and retest all these results? Wouldn't you think a massive, super-advanced organization like CERN would only report things it was pretty sure of? I agree this will need to be tested by others and proven more conclusively, but I do not doubt the validity of the results too much.

[RpgGamer]

[The Dark Lord]

 

Haha, nice.

 

How could they do this?

[The Dark Lord]

Has anyone heard any news about this?

[i_love_burritos]

nup. i just paraphrased what I had read / viewpoints of others. havent seen much since

[Golvellius]

Smells like quantum entanglement to me.

I doubt they were looking at the ejected nuetrino but an entangled partner in the vicinity of the detector.

[ilovecuttingyews]

This is about all I've heard since the actual 'discovery'. Essentially, some physicists say that if neutrinos would have gone faster than c, they would have shed energy, in the form of other subatomic particles, until they slowed down to c.

 

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-10/physicists-say-speed-light-breaking-neutrinos-wouldve-lost-their-energy-along-way

[Range_This11]

For all those doubting the results - do you honestly think CERN doesn't test and retest all these results? Wouldn't you think a massive, super-advanced organization like CERN would only report things it was pretty sure of? I agree this will need to be tested by others and proven more conclusively, but I do not doubt the validity of the results too much.

If the aim of these physicists was to bring Einstein's theories crumbling down, then they are going to do everything it takes to do that. The amount of fame, funding, awards, etc that they will now receive as a result will be astounding. Career-wise, they are completely set. It would be a mistake to assume that scientists are not human or incapable of skewing experiments to get what they want. I'm not saying the results are bogus, but there needs to be very extensive testing before we proclaim that Einstein's work is dead because these discoveries can completely change the way that we understand basic laws of nature---including gravity. That is not something to be throwing around lightly.

[i_love_burritos]

they've released the results to try to get physicists to disprove their results, or find some type of consistent error - they're scientists, not quack doctors

[Will H]

For all those doubting the results - do you honestly think CERN doesn't test and retest all these results? Wouldn't you think a massive, super-advanced organization like CERN would only report things it was pretty sure of? I agree this will need to be tested by others and proven more conclusively, but I do not doubt the validity of the results too much.

If the aim of these physicists was to bring Einstein's theories crumbling down, then they are going to do everything it takes to do that. The amount of fame, funding, awards, etc that they will now receive as a result will be astounding. Career-wise, they are completely set. It would be a mistake to assume that scientists are not human or incapable of skewing experiments to get what they want. I'm not saying the results are bogus, but there needs to be very extensive testing before we proclaim that Einstein's work is dead because these discoveries can completely change the way that we understand basic laws of nature---including gravity. That is not something to be throwing around lightly.

 

You're completely right about the agenda and directive of the scientists, but when it comes down to it, Einstein's model won't be proclaimed 'dead' no matter what happens. We still use Newton's laws as extremely good approximations for lots of macroscopic physics, we just do it knowing that it's not the whole story. Similarly, any paradigm shift as a result of faster-than-light particles won't forget Einstein's work, and we'll still use it as an approximation, but we'd also do it knowing that it's not the whole story.

 

A common explanation I've heard is that the neutrino may be jumping from space to space a short distance away via another dimension Portal style, so at no point does it actually break the light speed barrier, it just appears to do that to the simple distance/time measurement. If that's true, we'd end up saying that Einstein's model still works, but only in 4-dimensional spacetime, which real space is similar, but not identical, to.

[Strawberri]

My understanding is that Einstein's theory still holds if we accept the Speed of Light does != C.

[jasignhagj]

http://www.dvice.com/archives/2011/10/speedy-neutrino.php

 

To be honest, I don't really understand this, but apparently the extra 60 nanoseconds can be explained.

[Furah]

There's another factor that the distance by a GPS's measurements will be larger than the actual distance as the GPS calculates from the circumference, not a direct line.

[The Observer]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236

 

Another experiment has confirmed the result.

[Vezon Dash]

Yeah, my dad called me a few days ago to tell me that they debunked it. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

[The Dark Lord]

How was the original experiment's results debunked if they re-tested it and got the same results?

[Aeon_]

That's what I thought. ^