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CERN clocks faster-than-light neutrinos

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E

Earthstrike

Member
Is it possible that our estimation of the speed of light is what is incorrect? By what percentage would the speed of light have to be different in order for it to be the case that these neutrino's are not travelling faster than the speed of light?
 
E

Erigu

Member
JoeTheBlow said:
No it does not, why do people keep thinking this?
It just means that if we had a colony on Mars the communication delay would be reduced, if we could harness it. It doesn't mean you can receive a message before you sent it, that doesn't even make any sense unless you watch too much sci-fi.

I cannot fathom how anyone ever gets "time travel!" or any sort of causality-defying paradox from this. Quantum entanglement transmits information thousands of times faster than the speed of light and no-one is sending lottery numbers into the past.
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I won't pretend I feel like I truly understand this stuff, but:
http://io9.com/5846519/do-faster-than-light-neutrinos-let-you-change-the-past

(Also, I was under the impression we had no evidence that quantum entanglement could enable faster-than-light transmission of information...)
 
S

Stinkles

Clothed, sober, cooperative
A

androvsky

Member
Lord Error said:
Did they ever even commented on that GPS satellite clock movement relativity, which when calculated by someone, accounted for exactly the measured difference?
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Like I posted a couple pages back, according to the Bad Astronomy blog, they commented on it back at the original Q&A.
Badastronomy covered that story.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/b...up-ftl-neutrinos-explained-not-so-fast-folks/

Short version is the CERN guys say they accounted for that, but there still might be errors. The other thing is, wouldn't doing the experiment multiple times likely pick up different satellites moving in different directions relative to the experiment?
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Case closed!
Well, maybe. As I recall from the foofooraw that unfolded after the initial announcement, the original experimenters said they accounted for all relativistic effects. The paper they published, however, didn’t include the details of how they did this, so it’s not clear what they included and what they might have left out. It’s possible van Elburg might be right, but I expect we haven’t seen the end of this. After all, not long after the announcement, a physicist asked if they had accounted for gravitational time dilation — like relative velocity, gravity can also affect the flow of time, throwing off the measurement — and the experimenters said they had.
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T

Thagomizer

Member
OuterWorldVoice said:
Faster than Light is not causality breaking.

Instant is not causality breaking. Faster than instant could be causality breaking.
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So are you incorporating this into Halo 4?

lol
 
T

tokkun

Member
JoeTheBlow said:
No it does not, why do people keep thinking this?
It just means that if we had a colony on Mars the communication delay would be reduced, if we could harness it. It doesn't mean you can receive a message before you sent it, that doesn't even make any sense unless you watch too much sci-fi.

I cannot fathom how anyone ever gets "time travel!" or any sort of causality-defying paradox from this. Quantum entanglement transmits information thousands of times faster than the speed of light and no-one is sending lottery numbers into the past.
Click to expand...

People say that because of the factor, gamma, in time dilation equations. However, when velocity becomes greater than the speed of light, gamma does not become negative (which would imply time reversal within the reference frame of the thing being accelerated), but rather becomes an imaginary number. So we don't have a reason to believe that it implies time travel, nor do we really have a great reason to believe that those equations would still apply. Relativity is based on the concept that nothing travels faster than light and that it is impossible to observe something traveling faster than light, so such an observation itself implies that you can't continue to apply the equations.
 
P

Parl

Member
Meadows said:
Physics degrees given out before 2012 should now become invalid and those with degrees predating this year should lose their jobs.

Science: The Meadows way
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Including the degrees of the physicists who conducted these experiments, thus discrediting these findings, making everybody elses degrees valid again?
 
Z

Zoramon089

Banned
OuterWorldVoice said:
Faster than Light is not causality breaking.

Instant is not causality breaking. Faster than instant could be causality breaking.
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Wtf does "instant" mean? You can keep shrinking the base unit of time so the concept of an "instant" makes no sense
 
O

Orayn

Member
Zoramon089 said:
Wtf does "instant" mean? You can keep shrinking the base unit of time so the concept of an "instant" makes no sense
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Well, you can shrink it, but any shorter than the Planck time isn't really relevant.
 
M

Meadows

Banned
Parl said:
Including the degrees of the physicists who conducted these experiments, thus discrediting these findings, making everybody elses degrees valid again?
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yes

the scientific method as i like to call it
 
S

Something Wicked

Member
The report is saying is that a potential error in the measurements were likely not from the initial statistical representation of the data. The group was able to show that neutrinos can be measured separately, rather than "in bulk" as the initial report released in September had.

However, as this report admits, the error still may involve the detection process itself. To be honest, the timeframe is so small that I don't think they are ever going to be able to confirm whether the neutrinos were > c or not from this particular set of data. There will always be some lag time and uncertainty with the detection equipment and process control loop.
 
S

Sharp

Member
Something Wicked said:
The report is saying is that a potential error in the measurements were likely not from the initial statistical representation of the data. The group was able to show that neutrinos can be measured separately, rather than "in bulk" as the initial report released in September had.

However, as this report admits, the error still may involve the detection process itself. To be honest, the timeframe is so small that I don't think they are ever going to be able to confirm whether the neutrinos were > c or not from this particular set of data. There will always be some lag time and uncertainty with the detection equipment and process control loop.
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I'm pretty sure this isn't the case. If it were, there would be no reported findings. There are physical and mathematical restrictions on certainty and if this difference were below that we wouldn't be having a discussion.
 
K

Korey

Member
Study rejects "faster than light" particle finding

(Reuters) - An international team of scientists in Italy studying the same neutrino particles colleagues say appear to have travelled faster than light rejected the startling finding this weekend, saying their tests had shown it must be wrong.

The September announcement of the finding, backed up last week after new studies, caused a furor in the scientific world as it seemed to suggest Albert Einstein's ideas on relativity, and much of modern physics, were based on a mistaken premise.

The first team, members of the OPERA experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory south of Rome, said they recorded neutrinos beamed to them from the CERN research center in Switzerland as arriving 60 nanoseconds before light would have done.

But ICARUS, another experiment at Gran Sasso -- which is deep under mountains and run by Italy's National Institute of National Physics -- now argues that their measurements of the neutrinos energy on arrival contradict that reading.

In a paper posted Saturday on the same website as the OPERA results, arxiv.org/abs/1110.3763v2, the ICARUS team says their findings "refute a superluminal (faster than light) interpretation of the OPERA result."

They argue, on the basis of recently published studies by two top U.S. physicists, that the neutrinos pumped down from CERN, near Geneva, should have lost most of their energy if they had travelled at even a tiny fraction faster than light.

But in fact, the ICARUS scientists say, the neutrino beam as tested in their equipment registered an energy spectrum fully corresponding with what it should be for particles traveling at the speed of light and no more.

Physicist Tomasso Dorigo, who works at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and the U.S. Fermilab near Chicago, said in a post on the website Scientific Blogging that the ICARUS paper was "very simple and definitive."

It says, he wrote, "that the difference between the speed of neutrinos and the speed of light cannot be as large as that seen by OPERA, and is certainly smaller than that by three orders of magnitude, and compatible with zero."

Under Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, nothing can travel faster than light. That idea lies at the heart of all current science of the cosmos and of how the vast variety of particles that make it up behave.

There was widespread skepticism when the OPERA findings were first revealed, and even the leaders of the experiment insisted that they were not announcing a discovery but simply recording measurements they had made and carefully checked.

However, last Friday they said a new experiment with shorter neutrino beams from CERN and much larger gaps between them had produced the same result. Independent scientists said however this was not conclusive.

Other experiments are being prepared -- at Fermilab and at the KEK laboratory in Japan -- to try to replicate OPERA's findings. Only confirmation from one of these would open the way for a full scientific discovery to be declared.
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M

Misanthropy

Member
So they say that they can't do it and yet another experiment last friday showed the same data as the one a couple of months back? What? Just....idk.
 
B

bobbytkc

ADD New Gen Gamer
Misanthropy said:
So they say that they can't do it and yet another experiment last friday showed the same data as the one a couple of months back? What? Just....idk.
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There could be experimental errors. The new experiments were done by another group but at pretty much the same location with the same equipment. things are not yet set in stone.
 
W

Walshicus

Member
Seems like the Theorists noticed another reason why the results couldn't be possible, but the Experimenters replicated it under different circumstances.

We still just need it to be run on different hardware.
 
F

Freeza Under The Shower

Member
Misanthropy said:
So they say that they can't do it and yet another experiment last friday showed the same data as the one a couple of months back? What? Just....idk.
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The previous article says "existing data". They did not repeat the experiment, but looked at previous data they had already collected. There they believed to have confirmation of their initial reported findings.

But since it's the same equipment and setup, it might only demonstrate that they are using a setup with an inherent measurement error.

Which the Icarus paper makes the more likely explination for the Opera findings.
 
A

androvsky

Member
The Icarus paper confuses me. Is it just Reuter's writeup, or is their reasoning that the neutrinos aren't following the rules for particles that travel faster than light, and by the way, particles can't travel faster than light?
 
S

SRG01

Member
Sir Fragula said:
Seems like the Theorists noticed another reason why the results couldn't be possible, but the Experimenters replicated it under different circumstances.

We still just need it to be run on different hardware.
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they have. it was already done at FERMILAB years ago, but their own team discounted the results due to the margin of error.
 
A

AAequal

Banned
Doesn't really belong here but it was too cool not to post :D Atlas detector at the LHC is available in Lego!
OQMjZ.jpg
B9N42.jpg


more pics and info http://sascha.mehlhase.info/physics.php?open=atlaslego
 
D

Dr Zhivago

Member
androvsky said:
The Icarus paper confuses me. Is it just Reuter's writeup, or is their reasoning that the neutrinos aren't following the rules for particles that travel faster than light, and by the way, particles can't travel faster than light?
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Yes, it seems like they're saying "the observation doesn't match the theory, so the observation must be wrong."
 
T

ThoseDeafMutes

Member
Dr Zhivago said:
Yes, it seems like they're saying "the observation doesn't match the theory, so the observation must be wrong."
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No, they're saying that the particles should have behaved very differently were they actually going FTL, whereas they were behaving in a way that is consistent with particles traveling at ordinary speeds. The more ways in which the result is counter to highly verified theories, the more likely it is to be erroneous.

Given the experimental replication, the sort of error is likely to be a constant systematic error. To rule this out, rather than running the experiment the same way these people have again and again, people will try to find alternative ways to perform the measurements, and perform the measurements under a range of different conditions, or carefully comb through the process undertaken to look for anything that might cause it.

The public is very eager to feel smug and dismiss this extreme skepticism as nothing more than dogma or crusty old men who refuse to admit that they were wrong about something, but the skepticism is well placed given the implications.


JoeTheBlow said:
Thought experiments are meaningless when you deal with shit we still barely have a clue about, and the old "its time-travel if we have near-FTL spaceships" one is ridiculous, we may as well talk about transporters and replicators too.
Relativistic distortions are not time-travel.



Exactly. All these old thought experiments that have been going round for the past hundred years need to be ditched.
Especially the old "bob is moving at one speed, alice at another" ones.
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I can actually feel the pseudo-intellectual faux-enlightenment radiating like a beacon from your post.
 
O

Orayn

Member
Dr Zhivago said:
Yes, it seems like they're saying "the observation doesn't match the theory, so the observation must be wrong."
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All part of the scientific method, friend: You try your damndest to disprove the conflicting data, until you exhaust all possible explanations for it and the world only makes sense if your current notions are wrong. It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.
 
T

Timedog

good credit (by proxy)
Zzoram said:
Why?

We know how fast the speed of light is. We can sync clocks at two distant locations. We can measure the departure time at point A and arrival time at point B. If distance/time results in a speed greater than light, we've measured faster than light speed.

It's the same way to measure anything's speed.
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I just meant that the speed of light always just seemed like an arbitrary stopping point for reality. What if there's tons of "stuff" zipping around at speeds faster than the speed of light? What if dark energy/matter is "stuff" that is in a state that is seemingly unmeasurable or extremely hard to measure on a per "particle" or "unit" basis (like perhaps "things" that are FTL), but we can see them in aggregate over huge cosmic distances. Who knows? I just don't know why anyone would make the assumption that existence stops at FTL when we obviously don't know a whole lot about our universe.

It would be interesting if we actually somehow measured something that was faster than the speed of light though.
 
A

AAequal

Banned
Volimar said:
Tyson predicted this kind of turnout didn't he...

Damn. For a while a larger population was interested in this...
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Everyone with a Ph.D predicted this. One scientist even promised to eat his boxers in live television if faster-than-light-neutrinos were true. I guess we have to wait for more confirmations on the issue, still it seems like Occam's razor strikes again.
 
N

Napoleonthechimp

Member
It reminds me of what Robert Anton Wilson said: "The thinker thinks, the prover proves."

People see things in one particular way and will desperately seek a truth that fits their preconceptions. I don't really believe anyone in this little scientific dispute.
 
J

Jackpot

Banned
Quick, commence the conspiracy theories!

Obviously those darn scientists at the Hall of Science with their beards and labcoats all got together and decided to suppress the results in order to avoid having to rewrite the theory of relativity.
 
K

KHarvey16

Member
Averon said:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencei...ndoes-faster.html?ref=hp#.T0U_N0pYVRc.twitter

Nothing to see here, folks. Just a bad cable connection.
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The explanation needs clarification. It seems to say it was loose and when they tightened it the signal arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than they assumed. This doesn't really make much sense since the neutrinos were 60 nanoseconds early with what was presumably a loose connection. Unless the tightness of the connection was irrelevant to the result, in which case it's odd they mention it.
 
A

astroturfing

Member
Volimar said:
Tyson predicted this kind of turnout didn't he...

Damn. For a while a larger population was interested in this...
Click to expand...

i think also Michio Kaku predicted this (in some youtube vid), that it would be some error that has to do with the GPS...

oh well. maybe the Higgs is itself massless and travels faster than light? lol.
 
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