CERN scientists 'break the speed of light'

[white_wolf]

Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.

"We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."

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.

Full story: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8782895/CERN-scientists-break-the-speed-of-light.html

[FarLeftFist]

1. Amazing.

[Name removed]

57. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Avalux]

2. If this is true, it will blow astrophysics out of the water.

The laws are based on nothing going faster than the speed of light.

[nadinbrzezinski]

6. But black holes will be possible to explain

:-)

Or rather easier to explain

[Avalux]

7. I know! The possibilities are fascinating. n/t

[MannyGoldstein]

8. Why easier? nt

[nadinbrzezinski]

9. Because the math breaks down due to that Light Speed

matter.

If you input Faster than Light into the equation it will make it much easier.

I should add the other place where it will do this easier is at the moment of creation where the math seriously breaks down.

:-)

[MannyGoldstein]

13. I'm in awe of your knowledge.

A humanitarian who also knows serious physics!

Can you point me to the equation? I'm curious.

Thanks!

[nadinbrzezinski]

16. Equations

It gets really weird, I write science fiction so I had to read a lot of this crap... and my cousin is a particle physicist. I write fiction and draw doodles, he does math... weird, strange, incomprehensible math. My notebooks are filled with notes on the history of the US, labor, and character sketches... his are filled with squigglies I can recognize as number... and geek letters, after that not really.

But here is something for you that just got a boost as a theory. variable speed of light

http://www.thescienceforum.com/astronomy-cosmology/22204-variable-speed-light-cosmology.html

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

Wiki actually is a good place to start.

It will also make working on an actual Faster than Light drive (assuming we can over the small energy problem) possible.

[Fire Walk With Me]

24. FTL drives? Let's send the Republicans to explore the Boötes void. Yay!

[nadinbrzezinski]

25. Well with all the hot gas

I think we have the energy source just from Rush and Papa Bear alone!

:hi:

[Raster]

20. You never cease to amaze!

[unkachuck]

3. K&R....n/t

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. FTL drives... WHOOHOO!

I got my own theory on how to use one... and talked to a couple physicists. For a science fiction writer, they said I did very well, and one actually started doing the math in his spare time.

[ClarkUSA]

5. Star Trek, conceived w/the input of NASA scientists, stands prescient again.

Soon, our progeny may hear these words while standing at their stations: "Warp 10, full speed ahead!" :woohoo:

[Hippo_Tron]

12. Warp 10 isn't possible except with transwarp

With regular warp, if you calculate warp factor as a function of power usage then take the limit as power usage approaches infinity, you get 10. However, since it's an asymptote, there is no power usage value that you can input into the function that will give you an output of warp factor 10. 10 is a theoretical maximum that can never be reached.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive_%28Star_Trek%29#Warp_velocities

The Borg, however, don't seem to care all that much about these mathematical constraints...

[white_wolf]

19. Grr there's too many Trekkies in this thread.

Screw your warp drives. "Chewie hit the hyper-drive!"

[Hippo_Tron]

28. I love Star Wars, but it's more fantasy than science fiction

The fact that they write "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away..." before the credits indicates that you're not supposed to even bother trying to relate the technology that they have to the technology we have here in this galaxy today.

Star Trek takes place in the not so distant future and it takes place in this galaxy. It's actually a vision (albeit a wildly optimistic one) of what things will look like for us one day.

Star Wars is more about the epic journey rather than the techno-babble.

[nadinbrzezinski]

33. Star Wars is technically a space opera

in space opera technical matters are not that far from magic and not necessary for the story.

Trek is a tad harder, but at least IMO in the space opera\social criticism school.

Hard sci fi... give me some David Bryn

:-)

[DonCoquixote]

46. actually star wars

is really a Martial Arts Samurai movie set in space. Lucas was inspired by the Samurai movies of Akira Kurosawa, including one called "The Hidden Fortress" which is Star Wars minus the Sci Fi. When you look at it from that angle, all the stuff about Jedi Knights and "the force" becomes clear, as it is really old school Samurai Zen, which was influence by Taoism, which has the concept of Yin and Yang,aka the "dark" and "light" sides of the Force.

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

and to think, he originally wanted to simply direct a reboot of "Flash Gordon", him being the lover of 1940's serials. He did eventually get to revive the whole serial genre, by taking and old Character, Allan Quartermain, and turning him into Indiana Jones.

[nadinbrzezinski]

47. While that is correct

I am putting it in the context of sci fi

Space opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes romantic, often melodramatic adventure, set mainly or entirely in outer space, generally involving conflict between opponents possessing advanced technologies and abilities. The term has no relation to music and it is analogous to "soap opera" (see below). Perhaps the most significant trait of space opera is that settings, characters, battles, powers, and themes tend to be very large-scale.

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

And space opera is almost campy... and doing Kurosawa in space was just perfect to do it this way.

You forget the OTHER major influence for Lucas though...

Joseph Campbell and the power of myth

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

[DonCoquixote]

49. oh no I did not

as someone who has his books on my shelf: but then again, to do Mr. Campbell half justice would require a forum that might be equal to or larger than DU. Then again, his views on Myth might very well draw the ire of the whole "militant Atheist" versus "liberal Christian" warfare factions that make the religion forum here something to avoid.

[nadinbrzezinski]

51. Agreed,

I am a student of Mr. Campbell, but there are things you really do not want to go around this place.

On a much lighter note

http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23mundaneneutrinoexplanations

They are HYSTERICAL.

[WildEyedLiberal]

31. And apparently it turned Janeway and Paris into frogs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_%28Star_Trek:_Voyager%29

[nadinbrzezinski]

22. Well technically it is a space fold

inside a bubble of normal space... Alcubierre has been working on it for over 20 years in his spare time. On the bright side now we are to the point that the energy requirement to run ONE drive is not infinite, just near.

:-)

[InvisibleTouch]

10. I always thought the lightspeed limit was arbitrary nonsense anyway.

An assumption to make the equations fit. Not dissing Einstein, but he was working with the information he had available at the time - and just like his theories overturned the older Newtonian worldview, so new discoveries can expand our knowledge today. Lots of concepts have been labeled impossible throughout time, until someone discovered that they weren't. I think Einstein of all people would approve.

[FarLeftFist]

11. Can we time travel yet? Looking forward to stopping the 2000 election.

[white_wolf]

15. Traveling forward might be possible, but going backwards opens the door to a massive paradox.

Lets say you go back in time to stop the 2000 election, then you have a problem. The 2000 election has been stopped, so why would you go back in time to stop it, but then you wouldn't have stopped, so it's a loop. Sorry, if that was a poor description, I know what I'm trying to say, but it's hard to explain. I'm sure someone else here can do a better job.

[nadinbrzezinski]

18. 'xept that one theory explains you will be able to stop it

but now you are in a parallel world, not your home reality...

:hi:

And given quantum mechanics and how weird it is... there is an earth somewhere where the 2000 election was won by Al Gore, and 'nother where Bush never even went into politics... yes it gets weird

[Capitalocracy]

56. Maybe it works like in Family Guy

Stewie: Be very careful, any minor change you make in the past can have a profound impact on the present!
Brian: Really?
Stewie: No, I'm kidding, you can do whatever you want.

[Hippo_Tron]

38. IMO, that's where the writers of Back To the Future got into a logical jam

The first movie made sense. Marty doesn't intentionally go back in time to change something, so therefore there's no loophole. In the second movie, they do go back in time to stop Biff from getting the almanac. But precisely as that loophole arises, they divert to the fact that the Doc has traveled back to the old west.

[Capitalocracy]

55. 12 Monkeys?

You can go back, you can try whatever you want, you will fail to change anything? Is that a possibility?

I don't think (backward) time travel is possible because you would think we would've heard about it by now. Unless whatever future society came up with it has managed to really keep a tight lid on it, like, "Whatever you do, just don't let those goddamn neanderthals find out about this!"

[girl gone mad]

14. Here's Luboš Motl's take:

"Update: On Thursday, AP, BBC and Reuters finally leaked the news: the neutrinos are claimed to have arrived 60 nanoseconds before the light. Because this is claimed to be a 6-sigma signal, their total error margin of the timing should be 10 nanoseconds (3 meters over c); recall that the distance is 732 km. I leave it to the reader to decide whether this accuracy is plausible given the messy birth and detection of the particles. One nanosecond is the duration of one cycle of your iPhone microprocessor, among other things. Ten nanoseconds is 40% of the lifetime of the charged pion or 80% of the lifetime of the charged kaon. I can kind of imagine that they're doing something really silly, like imagining that each pion or kaon lives at least for the lifetime and then it dies. But some of them decay immediately; this error could erase most of the 60-nanosecond discrepancy."

It's fun to think about the implications, but there's a lot of potential for error w/in these results.

Even if the results are verified, this is not necessarily a violation of GR. The article goes to far with that claim.

[Avalux]

17. Thanks for that.

They'll need to reproduce it over and over; while showing significance. More to come.....

[nadinbrzezinski]

21. That is what makes this so much fun

:-)

[girl gone mad]

27. Maybe an even bigger reason to be skeptical..

Data collected from a Type II supernova in 1987, from http://profmattstrassler.com/2011/09/20/supernovas-and-neutrinos">Matt Strassler a few days ago:

Second, there are rumors on the blogosphere of neutrinos being observed to travel faster than the speed of light. A beam of high-energy neutrinos from the CERN laboratory near Geneva (which also houses the Large Hadron Collider) is rumored to have arrived earlier than expected at the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy, where a tiny fraction of the neutrinos are observed by the OPERA experiment. Keep in mind there’s no official announcement from OPERA yet, so this is just rumor-mongering at this point, quite possibly in error to a greater or lesser degree.

But in any case, one should treat any such claim, if indeed one is eventually made by OPERA in the near future, with considerable skepticism. This is partly because of the observations made in 1987 following the supernova.

As I mentioned, the neutrinos from the 1987 supernova arrived on earth within 13 seconds of each other, and were followed within at most 3 hours by the light from the supernova, the delay being roughly as expected. These coincidences are considerable evidence that the neutrinos were traveling neither significantly slower nor faster than light, and that they were all traveling at almost the same speed. Think about it: these neutrinos traveled for 168,000 years, about 5 trillion seconds, and arrived on earth within about 13 seconds of each other, and within 3 hours (about 10,000 seconds) of the light. If the neutrinos had been traveling 1 part in a million faster than the speed of light, they would have arrived months before the light; a part in a million slower, and they would have arrived months later. And if they had traveled at different speeds by even one part in a billion, they would have arrived not in a 13 second burst but spread out over hours.

In short, there is evidence from this data that the neutrinos traveled at the speed of light to an extremely good approximation — to perhaps a few parts in a billion.

[burrowowl]

23. Far Out!

Why can't human beans do more stuff like his instead of killing each other?

[unblock]

26. what's the big deal? everybody goes a few miles per hour over the posted limit....

[Capitalocracy]

58. haha...

gigantic scientific breakthrough, funny little joke. The elegance of humanity. I got a kick out of it.

[stevedeshazer]

29. Wow.

If these results bear out, everything we know is wrong.

[girl gone mad]

32. No, not necessarily.

Special Relativity would take another hit, but General Relativity could remain intact with some very minor adjustments. There would be no violation in Quantum Theory.

[Capitalocracy]

59. Depends on what you know.

I have the advantage of not knowing jack about physics, so you can't catch me off-guard!

[ClarkUSA]

30. Here are John Learned's (neutrino astronomer) and Joe Lykken's (Fermilab) intriguing responses:

John Learned, a neutrino astronomer at the University of Hawaii, said that if the results of the Opera researchers turned out to be true, it could be the first hint that neutrinos can take a shortcut through space, through extra dimensions. Joe Lykken of Fermilab said, “Special relativity only holds in flat space, so if there is a warped fifth dimension, it is possible that on other slices of it, the speed of light is different.”

But it is too soon for such mind-bending speculation. The Opera results will generate a rush of experiments aimed at confirming or repudiating it, according to Dr. Learned. “This is revolutionary and will require convincing replication,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/science/23speed.html?src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB

:woohoo:

[nadinbrzezinski]

34. Brane drives, not for fiction anymore!!!!!

Now I get it why they were excited when I went through it...

WOOHOO!

[ClarkUSA]

35. Yessiree. Anti–de Sitter, here we come!

:toast:

[nadinbrzezinski]

39. Posted this at my blog right now

http://nadinbrzezinski.posterous.com/science-fiction-brane-drives-and-real-world-p

I am on air... wow! FTL will be possible as long as we get around that pesky energy issue.

[ClarkUSA]

44. Nice work!

Move over. Let me join you on that cloud... :woohoo:

[nadinbrzezinski]

48. One of the people excited on it

was my much younger cousin. He does particle physics, and he started doing the math on this... as a hobby.

Kid's amazing... just don't try to understand his notebooks.

[burrowowl]

62. That is interesting!

[Fire Walk With Me]

36. Considering last night's post about repub teachings on electricity and the moon

this is going to burst brains like melons falling off a truck at high speed, if I may alliterate :)

Edit:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1976298

[nadinbrzezinski]

40. It goes in, it goes out

no miscommunication...
RLOL

[WillyT]

37. Man... This Thread Goes Great With Pot !!!

:smoke:

Thanks to you all.

:evilgrin:

:hi:

[nadinbrzezinski]

41. Here

http://nadinbrzezinski.posterous.com/science-fiction-brane-drives-and-real-world-p

more for your pot!

[WillyT]

42. Way Cool !!! - Thanks For Sharing That !!!

:yourock:

:bounce:

:hi:

[nadinbrzezinski]

43. I took all off line

as soon as the company died. but been rewriting... so I expect to go ahead and self publish that soon, actually probably sooner than labor history.

[Fire Walk With Me]

53. I thought that there was some consensus on their being 11 dimensions,

with those higher than the 4th being nested dimensions (would go to allowing FTL transit).

[yodermon]

45. checkout twitter hashtag #mundaneneutrinoexplanations

for a laugh

e.g.
"Neutrinos were fleeing from Facebook"

http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23mundaneneutrinoexplanations

[nadinbrzezinski]

50. RLOL

blakestacey Blake Stacey
Calculations done by visiting Americans who still don't get the metric system. #mundaneneutrinoexplanations
10 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

And there is more. Thanks, nerd humor indeed.

[nadinbrzezinski]

52. Oh and for true nerds

<----------

here is the actual paper

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897v1

[Admiral Loinpresser]

54. When I heard this

both of my Lorentzes contracted.

[unblock]

60. hmm, maybe it's e=mn^2 and not e=mc^2?

:shrug:

[sir pball]

61. Anybody know if neutrinos can carry information?

From what I remember from long talks with my cosmologist math professors, there's no problem with FTL travel as long as no actual information is transmitted - I remember a few years back some boffins got photon packets to move > c in rubidium gas or somesuch, but...well, see here if you're feeling ambitious. I'm quite rusty on the details and short on time to try and work them out, but the long and the short of it is even if the neutrinos ARE going FTL it doesn't really have to violate anything.

[Capitalocracy]

63. one neutrino for yes, two neutrinos for no?

I mean, define carrying information. I don't really know what that means in scientific terms (and probably shouldn't even be talking about this) but if you're sending neutrinos and detecting them on the other side, that's inherently a transfer of information, is it not?