Particles recorded moving faster than light: CERN

[Bosonic]

(Reuters) - An international team of scientists has recorded neutrino particles traveling faster than the speed of light, a spokesman for the researchers said on Thursday -- in what could be a challenge to one of the fundamental rules of physics.

Antonio Ereditato, who works at the CERN particle physics center on the Franco-Swiss border, told Reuters that measurements over three years showed the neutrinos moving 60 nanoseconds quicker than light over a distance of 730 km between Geneva and Gran Sasso, Italy.

"We have high confidence in our results. But we need other colleagues to do their tests and confirm them," he said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/22/us-science-light-idUSTRE78L4FH20110922?feedType=RSS&feedName=scienceNews&dlvrit=309301

[immoderate]

1. When they get there, can they look back and see themselves arriving?

:shrug:

--imm

[phantom power]

2. Is that in a vacuum?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

3. No, through the earth itself.

[drm604]

4. It doesn't sound like they violated c. I think the reporter may be misunderstanding this.

Neutrinos, which rarely interact with matter, are going to beat photons when travelling through an atmosphere simply because the photons will be scattered by air molecules while the neutrinos aren't.

The real test would be whether they can beat light in a vacuum.

[Sandrine for you]

5. no. the speed is 300.006 k/s for the neutrinos...nt

[struggle4progress]

6. " ... The Sagan Rule clearly applies: This is an extraordinary claim, and it will require

extraordinary evidence. Saying, 'We checked our instruments and we can’t find anything that would throw off the measurement by 60 nanonseconds' isn’t extraordinary evidence.

Parsimonious interpretation: They need to recalibrate.

Moreover, Einstein’s theory (Special Relativity, 1905) isn’t based primarily on measurements (though the Michelson-Morley experiment played a role in his thinking). Einstein’s theory emerged from thought experiments. It was a deep insight into the nature of the universe. Subsequent experiments for more than a century have verified that he was right.

For the new finding to carry a lot of weight, it would need more than an instrumental measurement. It would need a theoretical foundation. Otherwise you have something that is enigmatic rather than revolutionary ..."

Posted at 03:59 PM ET, 09/22/2011
CERN neutrinos faster than light?
By Joel Achenbach
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/achenblog/post/cern-neutrinos-faster-than-light/2011/09/22/gIQAkxBOoK_blog.html

[pokerfan]

8. exactly

I'm not ready to throw out 100+ years of modern physics on the basis of one experiment.

[tama]

11. "Spooky action at distance"

Supraluminal interactions verified by EPR-tests. In QED the propability amplitudes of photons are both faster and slower than c, and when summed up, lead to the measured values of c.

[laconicsax]

15. Is it superluminal, or isn't time travel? n/t

[tama]

16. Lost me

care to ask in a way that I can understand?

[laconicsax]

17. Ok, here goes...

Antiparticles are the same as their particle twin moving back in time. Now, I'm certainly no QED expert, but one of the interesting things about the interactions that you describe is that some of the probabilities involve photons and other particles moving backward in time. Time travel could account for superluminal probabilities.

So the question is whether the superluminal probabilities are really that or time travel.

[tama]

18. I believe

that it is generally agreed that, as you say, time is travel aka movement. But it is not yet generally agreed what forms time movement may and may not take in terms of geometric forms and shapes, even and especially in the scientific community. More specifically, what links time symmetric quantum arrow of time with unidirectional thermodynamic arrow of time? The best current answer to that question I've heard is that the matter is "philosophically obscure". Which could be one way of saying that nature may be much more wierd than we can currently imagine.

[laconicsax]

19. It's been a given that nature is weirder than we can imagine for a while now.

My favorite examples are from QED, namely the one Feynman gives in his book as an example of an antiparticle being thought of as it's complementary particle moving backward in time.

The recent work that produced photons from virtual particles is another good example. http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110603/full/news.2011.346.html">link

[tama]

20. Yeah

and what really blows my mind, even as mere hypothesis, is Pitkänen's idea that quantum jumps may come in all size scales from Planck barrier to quantum jump the size of universe, like Russian dolls, and as time symmetric, each jump rewriting/affecting both history and future of the whole universe.

[Chemisse]

7. It will be interesting to see if this can be reproduced. n/t

[pokerfan]

9. Faster Than Light Neutrinos? Not So Fast

So did the folks at CERN really record neutrinos moving faster than light? Was Einstein wrong about light speed being a universal speed limit? It's too early to tell, and regular io9 contributor Dr. Dave Goldberg has some doubts.

http://io9.com/5843112/faster-than-light-neutrinos-not-so-fast

[bananas]

10. Here's the preprint at arxiv.org - Check out the list of authors! A cast of thousands!

Check out the list of authors! A cast of thousands!

"Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam"
http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897


Via one of the comments at http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110922/full/news.2011.554.html#comment-id-26946

The OPERA paper is online :

http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897

Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam

Report this comment
2011-09-22 09:09:11 PM
Posted by: Luis Gonzalez-Mestres

[DetlefK]

12. Thousand authors? That's normal at CERN:

The core is maybe a dozen scientists, but it's common at CERN to list anybody who has contributed anything to the project. Unsurprisingly, scientists outside CERN are not happy about this.

[tama]

13. New newscientist article on the subject:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20957-dimensionhop-may-allow-neutrinos-to-cheat-light-speed.html

[bananas]

14. live conference video stream from cern today

It's on now.
http://webcast.cern.ch/

[Sancho]

21. Wasn't this in wikipedia?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive_(Star_Trek)