Brian Cox on Cern's baffling light-speed find

[xSilverPhinx]

This is interesting...though if Einstein was right and the speed of light really is the top limit of the universe and neutrinos beat that limit because they take short cuts through other dimensions, as Brian Cox said, then why doesn't light also take those short cuts?

"The course of least resistance." Electrons, when faced with the choice of passing through a plastic insulator or a copper wire core go through the copper. It's possible that the course of least resistance for a neutrino and a photon are different.

It's relatively easy for us to examine the behaviour of photons compared to neutrinos so we know a lot more about the behavior of photons. It is only in the last few decades that we have had the technology to measure the behaviours of neutrinos and thus we are finding things out about them.

I see. So the fact that neutrinos interact little with other matter could be a reason? Because string theorist claim that manifestations such as dark matter could actually be the effects from another dimension. Assuming that's the case, since gravity is similar to electromagnetism, so that's why I wondered.

I'm probably making a huge mess out of this, so if a physicist is reading this I do apologise

[Stevil]

By my logic, space would be full of black holes if this "limitation" could not be beaten.

In my mind, space couldn't have black holes without something being able to exceed the speed of light.

I completely agree with this

[Stevil]

Because string theorist claim ...

I don't like string theory.
based on a one dimentional vibrating string...
possibility of 11 dimensions.

As far as I understand, reality is 3 dimentional.

Until someone proves otherwise, to me string theory is rubbish

[xSilverPhinx]

String theory is purely mathematical, and as far as I know has never been experimentally proved, but I can't wrap my head around it anyways enough to really defend it.

Though they say that the other dimensions are curled up in microspace, which would be too small for our senses to experience in any way anyways.

Don't know if this has anything to do with it, but this stuff just blows my mind.

[fester30]

While this is very interesting I can't say I'm surprised...I operate on the general idea that pretty much everything we think we know could be shown to be false as we acquire more information.  Since we are so new into researching quantum level bits of our world and space in general I keep on expecting there to be a big change in how we view even the most basic of models. 

I'm wondering how this will end up affecting our understanding of the universe and if 'creation' models will have to be adjusted.

Easy.  Creationists will claim that this could explain why scientists are tricked by radioactive dating and declare dinosaur fossils to be millions of years old.  They'll also claim that this shows the universe may not be 14 billion years old, but instead could have come to be 6000 years ago. 

[Tank]

Additional commentary

Speed-of-light results under scrutiny at Cern

[Tank]

New theories emerge to disprove OPERA faster-than-light neutrinos claim

Short article, reproduced in full here.

(PhysOrg.com) -- It's been just two weeks since the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA) team released its announcement claiming that they have been measuring muon neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light, causing an uproar in the physics community. Since that time, many papers (perhaps as many as 30 to the preprint server arXiv alone) have been published seeking ways to discredit the findings. Thus far though, only two seem credible.

The first is by Carlo Contaldi of Imperial College London. He says that it's likely the OPERA team failed to take gravity into their math equations and its effect on the clocks used to time the experiment. This because the degree of gravity at the two stations involved in the experiment (Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy and the CERN facility in Geneva) were different, thus one of the clocks would have been running slightly faster than the other, resulting in faulty timing. If this turns out to be the case, the OPERA team will most certainly be embarrassed to have overlooked such a basic problem with their study.

The second is by Andrew Cohen and Sheldon Glashow, who together point out that if the neutrinos in the study were in fact traveling as fast as claimed, they should have been radiating particles as they went, leaving behind a measurable trail; this due to the energy transfer that would occur between particles moving at different speeds. And since the OPERA team didn't observe any such trail (or at least didn't report it) it follows that the neutrinos weren't in fact traveling as fast as were claimed and the resultant speed measurements would have to be attributed to something else.

Neither of these papers actually disproves the results found by the OPERA team of course, the first merely suggests there may be a problem with the way the measurements were taken, the second takes more of a "it can't be true because of..." approach which only highlight the general disbelief in the physics community regarding the very possibility of anything, much less the speed of neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light, messing with Einstein's most basic theories. The first can be addressed rather easily by the OPERA team if it so desires, and the second, well, if the neutrinos did in fact travel faster than the speed of light and did so without leaving a trail, a lot of physics theory will have to be rethought. Though that may not necessarily be a bad thing, physics is supposed to be about finding answers to explain the natural world around us after all, even if it means going back to the drawing board now and then.

[Always Amused]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ftl-neutrinos

I don't know. The cop's radar gun always clocks my speed as higher than it really was!

There are a lot of skeptics.

Lawrence Krause is usually pretty level headed, and he thinks the announcement was way premature. I think they are playing it to get more funding. Anyway, here is Krause quoted from the article:

It is an embarrassment as far as I am concerned. It was not unreasonable for the experimentalists to submit a paper with an unexplained result. But a press conference on a result, which is extremely unlikely to be correct, before the paper has been refereed, is very unfortunate—for CERN and for science. Once it is shown to be wrong, everyone loses credibility. 

Others are saying  that, if true, it totally upsets all previous conceptions of physics. Einstein was wrong!

But even if true, why are so many saying the sky is falling in the physics world? To me it sounds like they are saying General Relativity proved Newton false within his context of observation, when it actually addressed an expanded context. But that's just me.

Here is a quote from the article which states a view by theoretical physicist Heinrich Päs of the Technical University Dortmund in Germany:

It seems that the experimentalists were very careful, but this is really BIG news....

There are certain misunderstandings with people who are very cynical now: Even if true, this result neither proves Einstein wrong nor implies that causality has to be violated and time travel is possible. Things can move faster than the speed of light without violating Einstein if either the speed of light is not the limiting velocity as one can observe it for light propagation in media such as, for example, water. This can be modeled with background fields in the vacuum as has been proposed by [Indiana University physicist] Alan Kostelecky.

Or spacetime could be warped in a way so that neutrinos can take a shortcut without really being faster than the speed of light. As our three space plus one time dimensions look pretty flat, this would require an extra dimension (as proposed by [University of Hawaii at Manoa physicist] Sandip Pakvasa, [Vanderbilt University physicist] Tom Weiler and myself). 

(Pas is quoted in another article here, which helps put his comments in context.)
http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2011/03/hadron-collider-time-machine/

Glad people smarter than I are working on this!

[Tank]

Merged AA's post to the original thread.

[Always Amused]

Merged AA's post to the original thread.

Which I looked for, but obviously not very well.

[Tank]

Merged AA's post to the original thread.

Which I looked for, but obviously not very well.

Well it was a rather obscure title 

[Tank]

Neutrino experiment repeat at Cern finds same result

The team which found that neutrinos may travel faster than light has carried out an improved version of their experiment - and confirmed the result.

If confirmed by other experiments, the find could undermine one of the basic principles of modern physics.

Critics of the first report in September had said that the long bunches of neutrinos (tiny particles) used could introduce an error into the test.

The new work used much shorter bunches...

The plot thickens!

[xSilverPhinx]

So cool

I'm guessing neutrinos actually do travel faster than light, or least take a shortcut.

[Tank]

So cool

I'm guessing neutrinos actually do travel faster than light, or least take a shortcut.

Well we're not there yet. For a finding to be declared acceptable it has to be ratified by another tean and the kit to do this doesn't come cheap. And the probablility has to be beyond 6 sigma probability deviation and that is going to be hellishly difficault to get to in such a complex experiment.

I must say I am very attracted to the idea that the neutrino is taking a short cut via a 5th dimension. Firstly because it leaves the issue of the speed of light intact in 4 dimentional spacetime. Secondly it indicates there are additional dimensions. 

[Stevil]

Well, if you consider that mass attracts and that eventually mass is likely to be swallowed up into black holes and that matter limited to the speed of light cannot escape a black hole, and that the beginnings of our universe sounds incredibly like a black hole and that scientists theorise an inflationary period where expansion was faster than the speed of light.

Inside a black hole, matter breaks down, it is also likely that particles break down. When its mass hits such a threshold and matter breaks down enough, smaller than particles contained in light, is in inconceivable that this energy could travel faster than the speed of light and escape this black hole?

Otherwise wouldn't the universe and space be full of black holes?