Researchers have results which seem to show that for neutrinos, so they are asking for help to confirm them.
BBC News - Speed-of-light experiments give baffling result at Cern
Edited to improve title
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Researchers have results which seem to show that for neutrinos, so they are asking for help to confirm them.
BBC News - Speed-of-light experiments give baffling result at Cern
Edited to improve title
Last edited by MeteorWayne; September 26th, 2011 at 11:24 PM.
If the results are actually legitimate, then we are all in serious trouble indeed. At the very least, it would probably require a revision not seen since Copernicus overthrew the geocentric model.
Most Scientist are fanatics....no more than religious fanatics...arogants and self rightious... i told everybody that you can't limit the speed just because einstein theory. e=mc 2 just best assumption but one day could be broken... OPEN YOUR MIND.....OPEN YOUR MIND...NOTHING IMPOSSIBLE.....thing that are only in imagination now could be true in the future.
http://news.yahoo.com/roll-over-eins...94937846.html7
Why don't we all wait for the actual results. Cold fusion was released by press release before any scientific publications, too, and that worked out so well.
WOW.... I guess its a bad time to start taking physics classes hahahahaha
Well maybe we should just change the rules a little, like "nothing except neutrinos can travel faster than C". That will be the new law... But im sorry for being such a smart ass all the time. Seriously
This seems a little more serious and semi-confirmed by a lot of scientists. Can we ponder on the future of physics if it is actually true?
Could a neutrino have other dimentional properties that allow it to travel this way? Or is it being accelerated by dark energy somehow? or any other ideas?
Just imagine there are many layers of reality or we can call it parallel universe. Each universe has their own rule of physics. Those universes are stacked up like pipe on other pipes. But each pipe has different velocity of waters because it has different water pressures.The higher the pipe the higher of velocity and pressures it has. And just imagine nutrino can penetrate those pipes like a ping pong balls. It bounces from the lowest pipe through all the pipes till hit the upper most pipes and bouced back through all the pipes until hits the bottom most pipes.
So when the nutrino comes back or slip through our reality...from higher pipes ..it seems popped far a head. It happens all the time and the results it runs faster than light.
Call me a fool, but I can't see this making it past the scrutiny of the physics community. It must be a mistake. Or at the very most another QM "quirk"
That said, I reserve the right to be completely wrong, just like the foundation of modern physics if that happens to be the case.![]()
It wouldn't work as a law. The speed of light is the limit upon which all relativity between motion is derived (hence it's called "relativity"). If something, anything travels faster than light, then the laws of motion need an overhaul - and yet general and special relativity have proven remarkably accurate thus far... Which is why there is most likely an error of some sort (IMO).
How many times would you double-check your work, before releasing a press release like that?
I'm a complete physics ignorant with regards to study and only have a real basic understanding of a lot of aspects relating to it. However I read this story and really want to ask a few questions to anyone who might be able to explain things a bit further.
Firstly what exactly is a neutrino? Is it like an atom?
Second...if these neutrinos are capable of travelling faster than the speed of light what does that really mean? How does it actually affect us? I know for learning purposes and knowledge we're constantly researching and evaluating but how do we actually use this information?
Those are just the initial thoughts I have for now but if anyone is kind enough to answer them I may have more afterwards.
The paper is here:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897
PDF:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897v1
That's what I'm saying.. they will run the experiment 3 more times or something but what happens if they get the same results? They said on the article it must be very serious if eurpoians are asking help from americans and japenese. That does say a lot on how many people re-re-re-checked every possible malfunction and every thing was fine. They should first measure the speed of a photon to check their equipment before releasing anything.. unless it was a publicity stunt.. which would suck
Their setup can't measure the speed of a photon, since the neutrinos that they are detecting are sent through solid earth, from 500 miles away. Photons don't travel through solid rock very well.Besides, photons are slowed when they pass through materials (due to absorbtion and reemission). "c" is the speed of light in a vacuum.
Remember, the detected discrepency is 60 nanosconds out of a 2.4 milliosecond travel time.
No not at all. "c" is the speed of light in a vacuum, the cosmic speed limit.
The neutrinos (please spell it correctly) traveled though the solid earth over 500 miles and arrived 60 nanoseconds faster than light would have, had it been in a vacuum.
Obviously, light photons can't travel through solid rock, and other electromagnetic photons move slower through rock than c.
They are saying that in a vacuum they detected that Neutrinos are (60.7 ± 6.9 (stat.) ± 7.4 (sys.)) ns faster than photons would be over the same distance.
You have to remember that these results are based on statistical derivatives of many thousands of detections. The setup includes compensation for geological shifting, GPS margin of errors and timing margin of errors. They can't see anywhere where they have made a mistake, that is not to say that they haven't, or there is not an extra much larger margin of error leaking into the results they haven't discovered yet. If the results can be replicated in different experiment set-ups, and any unknown error margins ruled out, only then can it be taken as a valid result.
At the moment it is a single experiment that has produced anomalous results, that is all. Despite the fact that it was done by a reputable collaboration, it is not enough to overturn many decades of scientific study....yet.
By the way, lights "Speed" changes in different materials due to the time it takes for photons to be absorbed and another relased by different atomic nuclei, but the actual speed a photon travels at is always C, hence why they use the phrase "speed of light in a vacuum".
Last edited by Steiner101; September 23rd, 2011 at 07:41 AM.
By the way you are also incorrect, it is (60.7 ± 6.9 (stat.) ± 7.4 (sys.)) ns![]()
A webcast is planned today about the findings:
http://webcast.cern.ch/
for anyone interested,there is a meeting about this,on the Cern webcast today 1600 CEST
Live webcast
Come on now, you can't be that new to the internet. Start at wiki with "neutrino". I don't think you should expect people to teach you all the basics in a thread. You have to do some minimal amount of foot-work yourself.
Neutrino - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Well excuse me for wanting an actual person to provide an answer rather than half heartedly reading about it myself. I don't "expect" someone to teach me the basics in a thread either...a simple "yes it is like an atom" or whatever would have sufficed there's no need to be a dick. I genuinely thought there would be someone who would jump at the chance to pass on a bit of knowledge.
Oh and to answer you point in the other thread...yes I am impatient...not a lot I can do about that but apologise. I read a story about the speed of light being broken and I attempted to seek out an individual who could perhaps give me a little more information.
Heaven forbid that you would have to read something to learn. I see. One of the new YouTube Generation. Well, search on YouTube -- I'm sure you can find a video to "teach" you.
(By now, you could have learned about neutrinos and so much more -- of course you would have to read something.).
Wow...why such a hostile response dude? You've started out very passive aggressive when all I did was ask a few stupid questions. Are you one of those people who looks down on those that aren't as intelligent as you are? Sit there saying like "oh look at this guy...doesn't even know his electrons from his neutrons...what an asshole!"?
And honestly...I wouldn't even know what to search for on YouTube to begin with. I don't want to argue with you though...just one thing...do you even know the answers to the questions I posed? If not please just leave me alone.
From wiki:
A neutrino ( English pronunciation: /njuːˈtriːnoʊ/,Italian pronunciation: [neuˈtriːno]) is an electrically neutral, weakly interacting elementary subatomic particle[1] with a small but non-zero mass. Meaning "small neutral one", it is an elementary particle that usually travels close to the speed of light. Being electrically neutral, it is able to pass through ordinary matter almost unaffected, "like a bullet passing through a bank of fog"[2]. They are denoted by the Greek letter ν (nu).
Neutrinos are similar to the more familiar electron, with one crucial difference: neutrinos do not carry electric charge, which means that they are not affected by the electromagnetic forces which act on electrons. Neutrinos are affected only by the weak sub-atomic force of much shorter range than electromagnetism, and are therefore able to pass through great distances within matter without being affected by it. Neutrinos also interact gravitationally with other particles.
Neutrinos are created as a result of certain types of radioactive decay or nuclear reactions such as those that take place in the Sun, in nuclear reactors, or when cosmic rays hit atoms. There are three types, or "flavors", of neutrinos: electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos. Each type also has a corresponding antiparticle, called an antineutrino. Electron neutrinos (or antineutrinos) result when protons decay, through beta decay, to neutrons, or vice versa. Interactions involving neutrinos are mediated by the weak interaction.
Most neutrinos passing through the Earth emanate from the Sun. Every second, in the region of the Earth, about 65 billion (6.5×1010) solar neutrinos pass through every square centimeter perpendicular to the direction of the sun.[3]
Haha sad but true I agree with you pumaman. Its very simple to just look it up on youtube. I did and found a lot of the basic information. Although I didn't know they were sending neutrinos through solid rock, so my bad on that..
The clowns are out in force now anyway. The BBC news website even has a picture of the back to the future car in one of their articles. Give me a break!!
Let's get back to the subject: Speed of light broken?
I'm waiting for corroboration before I throw Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity out the window. This should be interesting though . . . .
I bet there will be a new law, "Quantum Relativity". Wait has that already been proposed?
Please stop the bickering.
Just to be clear. There's nothing wrong with posting a link, but its better if there's a least a bit of a lead in--a sentence or two is fine. What's it about? What level is it? Any personal takes on it's credibility...etc. In theory there would be no need for a forum at all if all that was required was passing links around. It would be a damn boring place as well.
Also, the last place I'd ask someone to do a search about science is Youtube, 99% of the science stuff on Youtube is complete garbage. Direct links to that last 1% are ok, but even then there are usually far more credible sources, like the free course video series at MIT and other universities for example.
Lastly, not everything written is interpreted as you intended, which means two things: 1)be somewhat cautious in your writing and 2)don't take the worse interpretation of everything written by others. There's a difference between "no need to be a dick" and "you're a dick", for example, but it's easy to see where writers and readers can misread people's intentions.
--
I very much doubt the findings and suspect there's something else going on, but that's just based on this being such a big discovery if true. As the late Carl Sagan once reminded us: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." One test result isn't extraordinary evidence.
Also, the last place I'd ask someone to do a search about science is Youtube, 99% of the science stuff on Youtube is complete garbage. Direct links to that last 1% are ok, but even then there are usually far more credible sources, like the free course video series at MIT and other universities for example.
Yes you do have to be careful what you watch on youtube, I was careful. I watched a real professor discuss neutrinos for an hour until I fell asleep haha. I learned what a neutrino is, an energy/particle created when an atom's weak force is broken. If I remember correctly, Scientists are creating anti-neutrinos that are in a controlled enviroment for study. The anti-neutrino has the same properties but has an opposite spin. Does this sound right?
Duly noted and understood.
As old PumbaMan has previously mentioned though let's get back to the issue at hand. Say this has actually happened right...one of these neutrinos has actually gone faster than the speed of light...what will that actually mean for us? (Looking for opinions only this time rather than facts I can find on the "internet"...hope that's alright with everyone...)
It is mind boggling. It has implications for cause and effect, the third law of thermodynamics, the whole concept of before and after, the arrow of time.It just can't be correct. [Humour]How can a neutrino be on its way to the detector before it has even been released? Does this mean that the future is deterministic? God help us all! lol [/Humour]
I think we will have trouble replicating this experiment, there will be some margin of error creeping in somewhere that invalidates the conclusions.
Last edited by Steiner101; September 23rd, 2011 at 11:59 AM.
Here's an interesting tidbit I found elsewhere.
If the figures given in the paper are correct, and neutrinos move ~1/40,000 x faster than light, then the neutrinos detected from supernova SN 1987A should have arrived in 1983!
and yet they say they only detected neutrinos 3 hours earlier (than visible light)from sn 1987a (which is explained as an earlier event prior to light emissions).....the plot thickens,as they say![]()
I had thought that gravity might be a tad faster than photons and that maybe matter too if high enough energy (hypernova) but this does not sound right to me.
I suspect some kind of error.
Did anyone watch that confrence webcast? I fell asleep...![]()
neutrinos have no mass
Then you should correct Wiki:
A neutrino ( English pronunciation: /njuːˈtriːnoʊ/,Italian pronunciation: [neuˈtriːno]) is an electrically neutral, weakly interacting elementary subatomic particle[1] with a small but non-zero mass . . . .
there are three type of neutrino,this experiment used muon neutrino,which you correctly pointed out (all types)do have mass.i was still back in the 50's there
Bear in mind though,neutrons are not fully understood.
superconductivity for example
Its all relative,indeed.i mean to be honest,music was equally as revolutionary as science is evolving.einstein was certainly not wrong,but more like 80-90percent right (as in the full meaning).....rather speculative i agree..i mean.how do we know that this is not some media hype...sensationalism...it certainly has merit from the view that it stimulates interest from not only the public(spam)but the government will be more keen to invest more in this research...sorry spammers,but this is serious stuff
The scientists should have accounted for the earth's rotation, revolution around the sun, the movement around the galaxy, the effect of gravitational time dilation due to Earth's gravitational well, relativistic length dilation, acceleration due to gravity due to every massive body in the solar system... is it even possible to measure anything so accurately here on the surface of the earth, to make such an audacious claim? I mean, brilliant and thorough though they are, they could not have possibly have accounted for the sheer number of influences that affect such sensitive measurements. So, most likely, it is a red herring, though I am very excited to hear this!
I have been thinking about this all night....(sad I know!).....
I have two though-theories.....
1) That somehow the neutrinos are "compressing the space" that they travel in, therefore taking a shorter route than light wood; thus conserving the not-faster-than-C law
or
2) the over-all wave length of the neutrino is far shorter than that shortest gamma-ray particle (I do not know if this is true - or even if a neutrino HAS a wavelength)....Stay with me on this......If the neutrino DOES have a shorter wave length then perhaps the theoretical higgs field (if it exists) is full of tiny holes (like a mesh) which allow the neutrino straight through - a similar mechanism to the mesh full of holes on the door of a microwave over, that are smaller than the wavelength of a microwave; blocking microwaves from passing through but allowing the shorter wavelength of visible light through (which is why you can see your food going round.
or
3) Neutrinos have mass - why then when there are billions of neutrinos passing through the earth, why are they not affected by gravity? should they not all clump together at somepoint? should we not see neutrino "balls" in space? - We do not see that as far as I am aware. Is there a possibility that neutrinos have "negative mass". IF a neutrino had negative-mass then perhaps it is "allowed past the C barrier". Having negative mass would also imply it has another property - negative gravity. Would this not suggest then that it is perhaps neutrino creation in beta-decay inside a star that stops the stars gravity from collapsing in on itself? - and when the star's fuel "burns out" i.e beta-decay grinds to a halt, hardly any neutrinos / negative (repulsive) gravity are being created therefore there is nothing to counter-act the gravity and the star becomes a BH. Perhaps also toward the very end of the life of some stars there comes a point when neutrino production rapidly increases and there is a "tipping point" of this repulsive gravity - and this is a factor in the explosive force of a supernova.
In addition to this, if the neutrino has negative-mass and are being produced all the time; then perhaps this could explain the expansion of space due to the force of its repulsive gravity. However - this is difficult to detect because the very nature of repulsive gravity would state that they CANNOT clump together so we would not see particular regions of the compression of space (like we do around positive mass "clumps" such as stars, planets BH's etc; but we would should see a universe-wide uniform expansion.
or 4) The neutrinos are being fired through the ground, right? through matter.....the mass of the sub-atomic particles of matter would be creating (albeit very small) a warping of space-time, so perhaps it is this effect which is causing the neutrinos to appear as if they are indeed travelling faster than light (that is if the physicists have only calculated the distance between the two endpoints and have calculated C to be travelling in a vacuum. so perhaps it is this warping at the sub-atomic level that is causing the neutrinos to take an ever-so-slightly shorter route ?
Personally I think my number 4 could be the most plausible explanation. But my hope, my REAL hope is that it is just because the speed-of-light is not REALLY a boundry or speed limit at all ! - now that WOULD be exciting (if also a little terrifying) - I SO hope that this is the case!........SS Entrerprise here we come ! :-)
IF the neutrinos moving faster than light do indeed turn out to be true then I think the next place we should look should be on the boundry of the event horizon of a blackhole which is feeding off a star. The matter is falling inwards but we should find neutrinos still escaping from the event horizon (that is IF the escape velocity is indeed speed C - it might actually be greater).
Interesting to think if an anti-neutrino beam can warp spacetime. Is it then possible for say a massive beam, to warp space, and then it would require less energy to accelerate a mass traveling with (inside) the beam? Then I wonder how fast can neutrinos really move? If there are a lot more concentrated, can they travel even faster? The negative mass with anti-gravity properties is a good hypothesis.
Thank you : - )
For anyone interested I have found the offical paper which has been submitted by the team for peer review. It can be found here: http://static.arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897.pdf
The neutrinos were fired, quite some distance through rock, to the detectors. Photons can not be made to do the same. How does one compare the speed of the two types of particles, when one type of particle can travel through any medium and the other one ( photons ) can not ?
I believe we scientists always need to keep an open mind and always follow the evidence to its logical conclusion(s). Whether or not the idea of 186,000 miles per second as a cosmic speed limit appeals to us, we should accept or reject it based on the latest scientific testing.
That said, I must admit that the news coming out of CERN does appeal to me. For some reason I don't like the principle that nothing can travel faster than light. I suppose it is too constricting to say that we can never travel to the stars in a reasonably short time. Maybe we can build a Star Ship Enterprise, explore new worlds, and be back at home in time to file our income taxes.
Jagella
I read the paper on arXiv, and thought it was very good. I like this kind of solid experimental physics. I would add though that I wasn't that surprised about the "faster than light" thing. People have been asserting that light can sometimes travel "faster than light" for a while now. It's to do with quantum tunnelling and evanescent waves aka virtual photons - for an analogy, think of a water wave hitting the front of an ice floe, and the back end of the ice floe starts moving before the water wave gets there. See for example Gunter Nimtz, along with this old NS report by Marcus Chown. Thus I don't see that this presents a big issue for relativity, which just doesn't cover the "quantum leap". However I would say that it causes something of an issue for the standard model, because that classes the neutrino as a lepton, when on gross properties the neutrino is actually more like a photon than an electron. If light can sometimes travel faster than light, and so can neutrinos, the inference is that neutrinos aren't so much "dark matter" as "dark light". Interesting stuff.
Thanx Farsight, for an erudite response to the above. Nor do I think it would present a problem
for Albert, if he was alive today. There are always anomalies in any theory describing physics,
as we understand them. That is why we do not understand things as they really are.
Never the less Farsight. The scientists at CERN will re-evaluate and double check the results,
and if they are right, we must learn that nothing is certain.
nokton.
Last edited by leohopkins; September 24th, 2011 at 03:46 PM.
As far as I know, the fact that the experiment was done using neutrinos does not conclude that only neutrinos can move faster than light. My guess is that neutrinos were chosen because they have very small masses and might be relatively easy to accelerate to great velocities.Again, I hope that the experiment's conclusions are correct. It's time for another paradigm shift in physics.Jagella
Actually, the purpose of the experiment to see if neutrinos changed types, which would show that they had any mass at all. Before then it was unknown whether they did or not.
If neutrinos have no mass, then isn't it possible for them to travel faster than light even under Special Relativity? I've read that matter that has no rest mass can travel faster than light without violating the principles of Special Relativity.One example of such matter is the hypothetical tachyon that must travel faster than light. Perhaps the experiments at CERN have uncovered these particles. If so, then we've discovered faster-than-light speeds that leave Einstein's theory intact.-
Neutrinos DO have rest mass. If it is found that they do not then the maths for beta decay are completely wrong...which would also throw the whole standard model into question.
Tachyons are hypothetical and yet to be observed.
I did have one thought though; If time starts to run backwards when moving faster than the speed of light then surely the moment the neutrinos broke speed C, time would have started to run backwards and the neutrinos would have never arrived at the detector (possibly returning to source). As far as I am aware that did not happen.
Time stops at speed C. Perhaps if indeed speed C can be exceeded time does not run backwards, it just remains "switched off", no matter how much faster than C you go.
I was thinking about that actually, along with the CMBR dipole anisotropy of of 627±22 km/s. These neutrino experiments are exploring neutrino oscillation, where the slight mass is thought to vary. See Neutrino detector on wiki. IMHO for the neutrino to have mass, and for that mass to vary, the neutrino has to be going slower than light, and its speed has to be varying. You can get a handle on this with "the photon in the box". If you trap a massless photon in a mirror-box, you add mass to that system, equivalent to the photon energy-momentum. The photon is still moving at c, but it's bouncing around, staying within the system, so its aggregate speed relative to the system is zero. This relates to Einstein's original E-mc2 paper: when you open the box the photon escapes, and you've got a radiating body which loses mass. Anyway, at c none of the energy-momentum is exhibited as mass, at zero all of it is, and there's a sliding scale between the two. I've never sat down and thought about what would happen if you went beyond the end of the scale.
See the wiki list of particles, the photon is classed as a boson rather than a lepton. You should maybe discount the Higgs boson - the Higgs sector of the standard model is the bit that some physicists describe as "arbitrary" and aren't happy with. You should definitiely discount the graviton, it isn't part of the standard model.
Agreed, nokton. Physics progresses. We can say that what people thought x years ago wasn't quite right. And we can be assured that in the future, people will say the same of us.Originally Posted by nokton
Im considering the possibility that this could be time dilation.![]()
The aim of the experiment was not to measure the speed of neutrinos. The aim was to measure how many neutrinos changed type during the trip. There is more than one type of neutrino and they can transform from one type. It was this characteristic that was being investigated and why neutrinos were used. The neutrinos arriving early was something that just happened to be noticed during this experiment. This leads me to believe that there is most likely an error to be found somewhere in the results. It is one thing to get certain results from an experiment designed to look for those results, because you are going to be actively working on accounting for all possible factors that could skew the results. It is another when an experiment designed to test one thing gives secondary results dealing with a totally different thing. In the second case, it is very possible that you overlooked some factor that would not effect the primary results you were looking for, but would effect the secondary results you found.
Thank you. I will refresh my knowledge on the SM.
(For anyone interested in watching the CERN conference on this topic, it can be found here: CERN Document Server: New results from OPERA on neutrino properties )
Latest joke:
The bartender says "Sorry, we don't serve neutrinos here"
Punch line: A neutrino walks into a bar
@Janus, good point. I have trouble getting my cells to reliably express and transport in a consistent manner. The tiniest operator change in procedure can cause drastic changes in experimental outcomes. Just when you think you've accounted for every possible variable, I'll be damned if you don't find another one.
I have a question: Does anybody know whether the beams of neutrinos, supposed to have travelled faster than light, were at any point of the experiment compared with beams of photons travelling the same route? That would be a way to see if the results were due to measurement flaws or error margin: Perhaps some photons too would be found to "travel faster" than the rest!
I like the idea that the neutrino is 18 metres across so the front end bangs into the detector 60ns early.![]()
The distance is not 18 m further (it is what it is, neither geneva or gran sasso came from it,s place (or that would have been news on itself) it,s meassured 18 meter shorter (something in the distance meassuring is wrong) or the distance was right but the neutrino,s broke a time record ; the timedistance was shorter then expected.
If the latter is the case (it can also be a combination) the consekwence is not that travelling to the past is possible but that it doesn,t occur or the meassurement devices in Gran sasso would also had to be in the past for the scientists or both in the past ....something science fiction like that.
The idea is the distance would be shorter by the size of the particle not longer
!----------baseline----------!
!-----------------------(18m)! <-- 18m particle
!---- dist traveled------!
Am I correct in thinking that in QED particles can be thought of as moving at any speed over short distances? (Years ago since I did any of that stuff)
Maybe the neutrino has big 'virtual particle size' or what every you would like to call it.
I think it is highly unlikely the neutrino that is thought to have a small rest mass can go faster than light, but GPS accuracy alone is alot it better than 18m by a long way.
Also their clock setup was impressive.
From looking at there video and papers, they should be well within the distance and time accuacy required to confirm it as a result.
The only reason is suggest it is because is would fit with the supernova neutrinos, no one would know if the turned up 60ns early
Well also it fits my condensing universe's problems with the weak force.
But would (the word says it) is not the case. If they moved the laboratorium or the detector it would be for both Neutrino and photon measurements. Or use different positions for meassuring both and then find the same time but this only shifts the position for the detector so what would it bring. The cites won,t move from it that,s for sure.
They measured less time then expected between two clocks one somewhere near geneva one near gran sasso lets keep it at that.
The given gps distance from the start of the experiment can have been too short (in which case the real distance is 18 meters more then the value they worked with) but thats not the measurement from the experiment then but something with the gps system.
This is all still a can be though nothing really verified.
Last edited by Ghrasp; October 3rd, 2011 at 12:24 PM.
Many people here are travelling faster than the speed of light. They are putting the cart before the horse. The reason the anomalous results were released by the participating scientists is that hopefully someone else will find the error they overlooked.
The speed of light and its insuperability has been measured thousands of times in the last hundred years and no superluminal results have ever been obtained. This is one result out of thousands, chances are it is wrong so, I don't think anything will be changing yet.
Michelson, Morley and Einstein are not spinning in their graves ( yet ).
theres a few threads where this might be relevant..maybe this one is the most relevant
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/...109.6562v1.pdf
Hi, dave, if answer is not simple, just give me link:
I know that neutrinos are detected whe they react : how do you cacth them before they react? and after you caught them, how do you shoot them? and at what velocity do you shoot them? can this influence result?
P.S OP, don't worry, remember the saying "the only stupid question is the one you never asked"
Hi Ray my original question was
"The neutrinos were fired, quite some distance through rock, to the detectors. Photons can not be made to do the same. How does one compare the speed of the two types of particles, when one type of particle can travel through any medium and the other one ( photons ) can not ? "
I think what I was asking, is to be possibly be found in the MSW Effect ( Mikheyev - Smirnov - Wolfenstein Effect. )
"MSW effect
Main article: MSW effect
Neutrinos traveling through matter, in general, undergo a process analogous to light traveling through a transparent material. This process is not directly observable because it doesn't produce ionizing radiation, but gives rise to the MSW effect. Only a small fraction of the neutrino's energy is transferred to the material. "
I am struggling to understand what I read. I may be on the wrong track, but I am enjoying the trip all the same.
The "reaction" is the "catching". As the neutrinos pass through a target material a percentage of them react with the nuclei of the material. This reaction produces a measurable signature, which is what is detected.You don't catch them and shoot them. What you do is use an accelerator to shoot particles at a target at close to c speeds. When these particles collide with a target, they create a whole slew of reactions which themselves produce neutrinos. These neutrinos will have momentum carried over from the initial particles, and thus you get a "beam" of neutrinos. You just make sure that your neutrino detector is in the direction that the particle accelerator was pointing. The velocity will be a combination of the initial momentum and the momentum generated by the creation of the neutrino. The upshot is the relativity predicts that this will never be greater than c is neutrinos have a positive mass.
and after you caught them, how do you shoot them? and at what velocity do you shoot them? can this influence result?
P.S OP, don't worry, remember the saying "the only stupid question is the one you never asked"
1) the point is that as neutrino have non-zero mass relativity is not valid, so initial KE is relevant and must be summed. So the outcome is influenced by the process.
2) Secondly it should be impossible to calc momentum as they do not know exactly what is happening the [actually they knoy very little about neutrino themselves] and there might be other unknown factors during reaction.
3) THirdly, if you can detect neutrinos when they react, how can you exacly time the exit of neutrino-bullets out of the gun at Geneva [they are surely not reacting then] to measure the length of the journey from that moment to the moment they react at Gransasso?
4) you use an accelerator, you say, how do you accelerate a neuter-ino?
Thanks
Last edited by ray; October 16th, 2011 at 07:32 AM.
Light is observed to move at a constant speed in all directions. Surely, this requires an external agency to move, sustain and regulate light's speed at its constant critical value. Any argument on speed of an entity, surpassing speed limit of light, without understanding mechanism of light's motion is premature.
A possible explanation:
"If it stands up, this episode will be laden with irony. Far from breaking Einstein's theory of relatively, the faster-than-light measurement will turn out to be another confirmation of it"
Faster-than-Light Neutrino Puzzle Claimed Solved by Special Relativity - Technology Review
From reading the papers and watching the web cast, they did verify the GPS timing against portable cesium clocks.
Didn't there used to be a neutrino shortage that was explained away by a three-flavor concept? We were taught that each neutrino comes in three separate flavors: travel changes them from flavor to another, and every time we think one is missing, it is really there but we can somehow detect only one flavor and the shortage is an illusion.
Perhaps then, just before a neutrino is launched, maybe it is being preceded by another one of an undetectable flavor that we do not know about. Then, just before the detectable neutrino reaches the target it becomes undetectable and the early-starting neutrino becomes detectable. This seems like cheating, but it wouldn't be as serious as breaking the speed limit.
The earth is moving. It is spinning, orbiting the sun and moving with the universe. Could this possibly affect the readings?
As I understand the experiment a source of nutrinos was projected in a certain direction and detected 500 km away in that direction. The direct path was blocked by solid rock. The nutrinos arrived slightly sooner than was expected.
Do we actually know they went by the direct path? We only measured them at the begining and the end. Maybe some took a short cut. Just because something exists at point A and then exists at point Z does not necessarily mean it passed through points B,C, D...Y. Granted that the way it usually is done but maybe we have just found evidence that it need not always be so.
Elburg seems to think that GPS was used to measure the times in the experiment. That alone pretty much undermines his argument. The clocks used for timing were stationary wrt the experiment; they were synchronized using GPS. Getting an accurate time from GPS requires you to acquire at least 4 satellites; these will all be moving at different (and changing) relative velocities/directions so one would not get a consistent error of his 32ns. Calculation of time from GPS already takes into account the relative motion of receiver and satellite (among other relativistic effects); so isn't he doing this twice? I also don't understand his logic for doubling the 32ns, it looks a little post-hoc to me.
The papers say, they also used portable cesium atomic clocks trasported from one location to the other.
That's what I though when I first read their paper. But further investigation made me doubt it. They used a "portable time-transfer device". This is not actually a travelling atomic clock but a high accuracy GPS system that is used to check the time measured by the GPS receivers at each end. This doesn't help with synchronization of the two ends, but it does detect any errors due to differences in the systems at the two locations.
Using this they determined that:
The difference between the time base of the CERN and OPERA PolaRx2e receivers was
measured to be (2.3 ± 0.9) ns [22]. This correction was taken into account in the application of
the time link.
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