f13.net

Speed-of-light experiments yield baffling result at LHC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484)

(http://i.imgur.com/HPheg.png)

(http://rarerborealis.com/wordpressblog/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/tumblr_lemkdyfPaq1qdoghio1_500.png)

Did they happen to mention if one of the scientific team members was named Zefram Cochrane?

I knew timecube was right all along.

Curses, beaten to the timecube reference.

Sweet Jesus my dreams of owning a TARDIS just got a booster shot!  :awesome_for_real:

This is how it starts people.

I'm pretty sure there's a rounding error there somewhere. 

That's a pretty rude way to describe the big bang.

CERN does not make rounding errors.

More likely, they either:
a) detected the advanced wave function of the particle (which would disprove Feynmann and still be a "wtf" moment)
b) the spatial density of the measurement region was less than the surrounding space (which is still "wtf" and would actually bolster the argument of a particularly ingenius 11 yr. old on youtube)

I'm inclined to believe it was the latter, which to me isnt a hard conclusion to come to if you subscribe to hyperspace.  I mean, we're talking energies approaching those necessary to produce micro-black holes.  Spatial fabric is not "vanilla" at this point as it isnt when the Higgs pops up either.

The math changes are what interest me most.  The philosophies are kinda the latest fad though... assuming I'm right.

edit:
this is involving the OPERA experiment, which actually shoots the neutrino beam from a station over 700km away.    Likely the result is a combination of the distance and the energy involved.  Gods I love science.

edit2:
Heh, their network is full of people right now.  Cool.

So, should we now be looking for a guy from the future coming back to this day trying to destroy the evidence? How does this stuff works exactly?

We dont really KNOW how it works, that's the point!
a hypothesis:  picture our bubble of space, wherein light travels at "c" distance/time.  Then picture a bigger bubble around our bubble that contains the same space spread out over a larger manifold...  wherein light still travels at "c" distance/time but relativistically to our "inner" 'verse it's faster because our version of space is compressed compared to the outer bubble.  feel me?

Spatial density determines distance.  Kinda like you can take 10 points on a straight line 10 miles long, or 10 points on a straight line 1 mile long.  There's still 10 points of space on the line.  A particle will travel those 10 points at the same speed, but in one space it's shorter/denser therefore the particle travels slower through it.

In regards to the OPERA experiment, they may have "stretched" those 10 points of space, making the region less dense slightly, allowing the neutrino to travel quicker relative to "normal space."  Or perhaps the space between the gun and the detector was innately different regardless of the energies involved, which is a popular realm of thinking these days.

Hmm, could be there is a casimir effect going on within the earth also... making regions of space between close matter less dense due to reduced vacuum fluctuations, allowing the neutrino to travel quicker.

OR, maybe the beam disguised the neutrino to the higgs field making it completely massless for an instant.  Giving it more of a spooky action.

/headhurts

Maybe they used a faulty ruler when they measured those 732 kilometers.

Well.  Along those lines, even though I know you were joking, could all the earthquakes of late possibly have shifted it ever ever so slightly?

Which would fit with the "There is no such thing as gravity" school of thought, that Casimir force, gravity, "dark energy", "dark matter" and the cosmological constant are all the same thing.  What we call gravity is just a macro-scale effect of vacuum energy pushing against matter.

--Dave

Fuck you all, I want to believe in magic!  :why_so_serious:

And is also the only force (we know of) that could possibly translate between 'branes.
I had a theory where dark energy is actually just the leftover momentum from before the big bang, which was caused by two 'branes colliding to form our universe.  Stuff traveling within this momentum moves faster for still the same spatial density reasons.  e.g. space is stretched along these "birth stretch marks" of space therefore allowing faster than light travel.

That was a joke.   :drill:

Actually, not really a joke.  They themselves think they might've made a mistake, even after going over the data over and over.  A 'rounding error' is not at fault, but it could be as they call "systemic."  That's why they made it public before publishing.

Who else can recreate the damned experiment though?  It's kinda what they say goes.

They certainly could have made a mathematical error somewhere along the line, but it was likely not a rounding error.

Digging around I found out the accepted experimental error is +/- 10ns.  The experiment has been ran 15,000 times over 4 years and statistically has actually shown a c+60ns variance.  The neutrino arrives 10metres before it's supposed to.  Or, in 2.3ms (the time it takes light to travel 700km) it's gone an extra 10metres.  On cosmological scales, obviously this becomes fairly significant... especially since for this to work in some theories requires acceleration.

There's some thought now that photons may actually now have mass, and dont travel at c.  But, this I dont agree with.  

edit:  there's some confusion over whether the particles are traveling faster than light or faster than c.  There's a big difference here obviously.  Needs more clarification.

edit2: it's ns not ms

Obviously

Ok, it's definitely "c" (meaning speed of light in a perfect vacuum) and not simply speed of light, per the article directly from CERN.
For those interested, there's a conference coming up today on the matter.
http://webcast.cern.ch/

I'm trolling physicsforum right now trying to gain some more insight.  The people over there seem rather fixated on photonic mass, which is really only half a solution if at all since you'd still need RELATIVELY warped space-(time) to pull it off.  Or there's some type of causality issue going on here perhaps.

Clearly, a wizard did it.

Are they traveling through a vacuum the whole distance?

Neutrinos don't interact much with matter; they pass through planets easily.  For all intents and purposes everything is vacuum to them.

But the mention of "vacuum" above is to differentiate between the speed of light "c" (THE constant that Einstein and physics people use) and the various other speeds that light can have in various media (fiberglass, water, etc), where some materials can slow light down to a crawl.

Ideally, would this also open possibilities of future starships traveling faster than the speed of light?

As Stephen Hawking correctly (at least in my opinon) stated, the future of humanity resides outside planet Earth.

Obviously, beside the resolution of other problems related to that (bone degradation during the voyage, adapting to another planet conditions etc.), the major factor is the *duration* of the voyage itself.  Currently, for a "simple" probe like "New Horizons" (heading to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt), it takes 9 years to get there. Then consider that the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is  4 light years away :P. Discovering a way to travel that fast will be the greatest (and most important) scientific breakthrough in human history.

Gravitational sling-shot effect.

The same used by the probes nowadays, you mean? (Galileo, Cassini and others used it, as far as I recall)

By the way, as previously stated by Ghambit, there will be a live webcast about the discovery: today, from 10am EST to 12pm

http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=155620

Kinda proud that Italy, among others, was involved in this  :)

Dont pat yourself on the back yet, it's still more than likely a systemic anomaly.  They just cant figure out from where and it's not clear if they've already accounted for the few anomalies some have spoken of, like c-variances in the GPS system due to atmosphere, breakdown times during neutrino inception (you cant fire a neutrino, it has to be made from a tau/muon particle wherein things can get 'spooky'), and even quantum tunneling.  In regards to the latter, someone calculated that coincidentally it'd gain 80ns of space if tunneling through an aluminum nucleus.   :awesome_for_real:

This webcast will be pretty well watched methinks.

Also, even if the data holds I still do not believe c was ever "broken."  You must be careful when you say this.  It's more like space-time was haxored.

disclaimer:  I am an armchair physicist like normal people and know shittall.

We should prepare for unforeseen consequences.

What a fucking weird coincidence.  I drove to work today many billionths of a second faster today than I did yesterday.  I'm talking tons of billionths.  I bet there'll be some scientists waiting to talk to me when I get home.  No way it was a rounding error, though I was speeding a bit. :headscratch:

What the hell are you getting on about??  I dont understand your analogy.

What the hell are YOU going on about.

I don't understand half this thread.

From what I understand:

We have discovered that a fundamental prinicple (law of physics?) may have been broken in the fact that a "thing" has been identified as traveling faster than the speed of light, which has been deemed the limit.
We are now trying to limit the damage to that principle with the "exception to the rule" debate to minimize its impact on the foundations of this area of science.
Finally, further testing and reconstruction of this experiment will end the world by destroying time itself... that date has been calculated as some time in late Dec. of next year.

*disclaimer: I am on Vicodin today and really don't give a shit about making any sense... I can't wait to see what this SAS report is going to look like on Monday too... :grin:

Watching the webcast: I'm understanding basically nothing, but it's fascinating nonetheless  :grin:

That would be me. And I've already succeeded. By next week, the great majority of the unwashed masses of humanity will be prattling on about the latest Jersey Shore or whatever shitty equivalent my other associates have come up with in their areas of operation around the globe. The rest of the news will be buried and the parties responsible for this discovery relocated to places better suited for their talents.

YOU ARE NOT READY.

But you can at least understand that pretty much this experiment is (by a factor of at least 10) the most precise measurement of neutrino speed ever in mankind.  It's actually been simmering in Europe since what, 1973??  Waiting for the technology to actually make it happen.

What a beautiful goddamned experiment, even if there ends up being errors. 

I can say most of the crap I learned would be obvious places to look for systematic issues, they have easily accounted for and then some.  He's also defending his findings (the webcast is still going on btw)  against his peers beautifully.

Absolutely. It was an amazing presentation and among all the technical jargon, I surely grasped how carefully all this was carried on, and also the possible systematic issues (and the conclusions). Nice Q&A session too :)

I'd certainly find that more comforting than the notion of American society deciding "The Situation" and that bloated chick were worthy subjects for such exultation.

(http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/neutrinos.png)

Here's a post about this topic on physicsforums.com, just to show how "orthodox" people can be (but of course with a certain basis, yes). Also funny to read if you like paradoxes and stuff :

http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=532620&page=11

Yeah, I especially like number four... relativistic simultaneity is a harsh mistress.

My favorite fact about neutrinos:

In order to be 99% certain you'll stop a gamma ray, an extremely high energy photon, you'd need a wall of lead ten centimeters thick.

In order to be 99% certain you'll stop a neutrino, a very weakly interactive particle, you'd need a wall of lead FIFTY LIGHT YEARS THICK.

Most of the physics community right now...

It's funny how these physics guys dont like to talk about the theoretical.  They remind me more of engineers than physicists actually, which delves into that age-old fight between cosmologists and particle physicists.  Instead of using this data to promote a thought experiment that Einstein would've appreciated, they use Einstein to simply stop the chatter altogether.  Kinda maddening.

I have yet to see a single quantitative theoretical post from the whole of the physicsforum on this.  You either play by their rules or are shunned.

Quantitative or qualitative?

Either.  And actually, in that place prepare to be ignored if you go the qualitative route.

Obviously this is bogus, established science never turns out to be at least partially incorrect.

Maybe this is what it felt like when it was announced that Light travelled at the same speed no matter what your position. Couple of years later the universe gets turned upside down.

Oh hey Mr. Feyerabend. Honestly this is one of those times when that paradigm view of science comes to the fore, an experiment that threatens to wholly undermine the existing dominant paradigm will generally get exceptioned and coopted to the greatest extent that it can into the existing paradigm. If it genuinely can't, typically it'll get taken up by a few present scientists and the following generations but you really can't expect those already in the fields and fully immersed in the present paradigm to throw it all out the window (as far as they're concerned). It's one of those moments when the practice and general idea of how science runs can separate quite visibly.

On the other hand 99% of the time these sort of experiments don't really require shifting to a new scientific paradigm and science wouldn't get a lot done if people started throwing away theories and models the minute something suggested that they didn't work.

They've probably done this already, since they've published their results, but personally I'd be looking for computer clock and synchronization issues.  Everything is measured by computers, and they are 700+ km apart, and 10 ns seems to be in the realm of several clock cycles.

Step 2, of course, would be to shoot the neutrinos at the detectors in Japan and see if the increase in distance results in a correspondingly higher time discrepancy.  Though, again, computer clocks not being synchronized can be dependent on the distance too.

It's the classic dork-model of social interaction when you take part in physicsforums threads such as this.  That is, it's self-defeating.   :oh_i_see:
Literally, any jackass knows only OPERA has access to every slice of data, yet the forum rules require no speculation and no theoreticals in the thread. ummmm, ok.
So basically, the thread is full of people either:

a)  getting yelled at by the moderator for being too theoretical
b)  just flat out ignoring the experiment altogether and knowitall debating the experimental physics that were already explained in the paper and seminar

Everyone loves the mathy person in "b" with his smooth recitation of interesting/complex facts.  But, I guess nevermind the fact he failed to actually pay fucking attention to the details of the experiment.  Meaning, I just wasted 5 minutes reading your opposition to something that never occured.

Moral of story?  Particle Physicists aren't as smart as they seem to be.

It sort does have to be an error of some kind, though. Otherwise we'd already have had some observations of the phenomenon, because over long scales it's a really significant difference. We'd be seeing neutrinos arriving in bursts months or years before we saw everything else from supernova.

Unless there's something very, very particular about the type of neutrinos, circumstances of travel and observation, etc., that's reproducible that wouldn't normally pertain from natural sources of neutrino emissions?

If "some neutrinos do actually travel faster than light" is actually how the universe work, how would people know to look for tachyonic neutrino bursts? By the time the light from whatever source caused the burst hit Earth, the neutrinos would have already been and gone.

There are a few experiments going on right now trying to find the elusive naturally occuring high energy neutrino.  I dont believe they have yet.   And it's possible they only exist fleetingly (say just before exiting a sun's corona).  Which means we wont see them.

And it's almost more important to actually follow the path of a LOW energy neutrino, which we've not been able to do at all.  All we do is detect them... no one knows wtf they do enroute.

I suggested devising an experiment that'd be able to tag and track low-energy neutrinos, but of course was shot down.  Neutrinos are the only known perfectly "directional" partcile in nature.  That is, they travel in straight lines no matter what's in the way.  This means theoretically you should be able to statistically isolate some and measure their travel times.  (shrug)  But wtf do I know, I'm just lamestream I guess.   :roll:

Funny thing is, science NEEDS this particle to give an excuse to expand the physics.  Our current physics flat out doesn't universally work.  If OPERA is the first evidence of Hyperspace, this is a good thing.

Until the Great Old Ones come through the breach in space-time.

On average, at any given instant in every cubic meter of space in the universe there are about 330 million "low energy neutrinos". Near a star, the density is a bit thicker: On Earth, for example, about 40 billion neutrinos pass through any given cubic centimeter every second. In order to be 99% certain of stopping any particular one you need a wall of lead 50 light years thick. Even a monatomic "wall" that thick would contain more atoms of lead than exist in the universe. Detecting a specific individual neutrino is more or less equally difficult. To say these things are difficult to affect is a phenomenal understatement.

The fact that OPERA found a way to distinguish their burst of neutrinos from the background flood is a major scientific achievement on the bleeding edge of experimental physics. There are not currently any easy, straightforward answers for how to improve their technique.

Well, their technique wasnt really new (it's been done in the past) nor complex.  All they did was create GeV (high energy) neutrinos instead of MeV ones.  That way, they only needed to detect GeV neutrinos.  Since there are no naturally occuring GeV neutrinos (that make it to earth anyways; it's possible they do exist though) they obviously knew how to find them. 

My idea was to use a directional variable to isolate and tag neutrinos. e.g. only detect neutrinos that have followed "x" path for a certain amount of time.  This would be a small detector obviously.  The smaller the better.  The idea is to limit the frame as much as possible.

How the heck do you do that?  Unless you could get a beam strong enough or detector sensitive enough to give you a "smoke trail" ala a laser illuminating a mist, you have no way to determines directionality.  Even with this experiment they needed thousands of events to be sure they were detecting their GeV manufactured neutrinos and not natural background.

The theory that seemed most interesting was that the neutrinos were tunneling through matter nuclei, that when they hit one side of a nucleus they warped/jumped/were re-emitted instantly on the other side.

--Dave

You cannot choose what to detect.  Either a particle passes through a detector or it doesn't.

You cannot even be certain it is your particle unless you repeat the experiment thousands of times (then any given particle is statistically yours) or you have a series of detectors set up and and can watch the trail light up as it passes through them sequentially.

If this is a true result and not a miscalibration, then tunneling makes the most logical lay-sense.  (This is particle physics.  What we think of logic doesn't have to apply.)  But if nutrinos tunnel through any nucleus they encounter, that would explain why they're so hard to stop.  But it also poses an interesting conundrum if this is the case.  In pure vacuum they do travel at the speed of light.  When they encounter dense matter, they speed up.

What if gravity is just an attempt by matter to tunnel through other nearby matter, but it really only works well for the smallest and highest energy particles?

(http://nukees.com/comics/nukees20110926.gif)

The most likely explanation when someone finishes a race faster than you think possible is that they cheated.  It's not as far as they thought or there's another measurement error somewhere, I'm surprised people are taking this so seriously.

It's not that we take it seriously, but that it gives us something tangible to formulate a thought experiment over.  Also, neutrinos are scientifically very mysterious right now and your taxpayer dollars have gone to the tune of many many billions into just that one damned particle.  So regarding the media, I'd suggest we cut them some slack since that's pretty much what's funding this shit to begin with.

Speaking of which (gravity probe B, et. al), the only relativistic phenomenon they didnt account for was frame-dragging.  So that's another possibility now as well.  They'd have to calculate it for earth rotation and orbit around the sun.

As for my semi-psychotic low energy neutrino radar gun invention, I'd need to doodle some stuff and post it to be clear about it.  I'm lazy though.

I'm too dumb to grok the details about all of this, but if science dismisses it out of hand because it doesn't meet established doctrine, how is science different from religion?

Because while some may dismiss it, many others will try to actually test it. Attempting to disprove religion undermines the concept of faith, upon which it is based. Attempting to disprove science is what makes science work.

And if they actually do prove out and undermine the Standard Model (or at least make it require some fundamental revision) the overall physics community will genuinely try to find the parameters of it with new experiments, rather than just declare it heresy and anathema on anyone who pursues it.

--Dave

Relativity isn't doctrine, it's just a theory that has failed to be proven wrong after thousands upon thousands of tests. No experiment yet devised has found a hole in it. William of Ockham posits that something we don't understand is more likely to be a simple fact we forgot to consider rather than some new mystery we haven't even guessed. "Simple" is a relative term, of course, so in the case of neutrinos the obvious thing we're missing might be well understood by only a handful of people. The OPERA team wanted to make sure those people would take a look at their methodology and results.

If a coin comes up heads thirty times in a row, what are the odds that it will come up heads again? There are two popular wrong answers: The hopeless rube says "It's just GOTTA come up tails this time," and the educated rube says "50%."

Science figures that the odds of getting 30 flips in a row is less than one in a billion, and says "Let me see the other side of that coin."

There's a good Feynman lecture in the book The Character of Physical Law where he explains that in general, things aren't randomly proven wrong just because you have more sensitive instruments. Generally what happens is that you end up testing really small or really big and don't get the answers you expect. The unexpectedness is generally on one end of the scale or the other. The example he used was speed, newton works all up until you start going really fast, and then the entire thing breaks down. We didn't have the capability to measure that a few hundred years ago and so never saw the error.

So has this mystery been solved yet? Have we achieved warp speed or what?

I traveled to the future and got the answer, but I'm not telling.  Oh, I also won the powerball... again.  :why_so_serious:

And this particular timeline you are now on is not the same one you came from.  Soooo, your answer and your pball numbers may or may not be valid.  :grin:
Anyways, anything besides MINOS re-starting their experiment with better metrology is just speculation.  And there's no news yet whether they intend to do this or not, at least where I've looked.

The team that made the discovery is behaving correctly in opening up their data for wider interpretation.

Stuff like this should be taken seriously because there's a chance it is correct.

This just in.... http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/nov/18/neutrinos-still-faster-than-light?CMP=twt_fd (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/nov/18/neutrinos-still-faster-than-light?CMP=twt_fd)

They still look like they might be faster.

Phil Plait and others still remain skeptical; they say the timing issue is in the detector, which wouldn't be affected.

If the wavefunction turns out to be real, the differences of anti-matter to matter are significant, and this is true; we may actually see some real progress in physics after what seems like decades of wheel spinning.

I think the experiment is mainly to confirm the result is not an anomaly, doesn't solve any of the other possible errors.

LOL.

Unless this involves me finally getting a flying car, I don't care.

You got in one yesterday.

I wonder will that guy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Mallett) put his time machine project on hold.

Yeah, the problem in physics has been two-fold -- for starters, the Standard Model is just damn good. There biggest "WTF?" stuff out there is questions over the Higgs and trying to resolve QM properly.

There's been a dearth of weird-ass phenomenon to kick-start odd questions. Like "What the fuck's up with Mercury's orbit" did.

Secondly, the real esoteric stuff -- the nuts and bolts of the universe stuff beyond the Standard Model that has the potential for cracking open some big new doors? Nobody can test that shit. We lack the engineering, energy, and money. We've just now -- two decades or so late -- finally got around to having a particle accelerator that can give us some info on the Higgs.

Trying to monkey around past that is just off the charts.

The big problem is no one wants to fund any advanced HEP of the scale necessary needed to do even more truly interesting research.  CERN is a great start, but so much of it is so far from being done and ready to give us any usable data to analyze (we're talking 10+ years out assuming all the funding falls into place).  Tons of work is being done and investigated, but these things take lots of time to fully analyze (there's multi-TB data sets from 10 years ago that are still being processed).  Since the general public's perception is we aren't doing "real" science with concrete results, politicians are very unwilling to fund billions of dollars on something that will not produce any obvious benefits by the next election cycle.  I mean, the space program can put people on the moon and trying to hit Mars is actually a tangible benefit that can be sold to the public, and the politicians can't even get behind THAT and fund it. 

How do you fund a foray in what many physicists now believe is a holographic universe?  You pump money into quantum computing, that's how.  Best way to understand the matrix is to build one ourselves.

Science fiction, the last refuge of the daydreamer.

So c is going to be the speed of neutrinos instead of speed of light?

Turns out my desk at the office is, in fact, the only refuge of the daydreamer.

"Massbit" theory is lookin sexay. Wherein even information has a minimal mass, even though it can travel "instantaneously" across our 'brane; more like transpose/port really.  This is a proposed accounting for what dark matter/energy is.  Pretty much the universe expanding more and more rapidly due to the simple fact it cant chunk and iterate that much information w/o the frame expanding... similar to you or I adding RAM to a computer.

... only then they try to prove it with maths.

Nah, light speed is just a bitch. Neutrinos may just have an out.

I still think it's unlikely. I bet it boils down to the same thing as last time this came up -- you can technically get some stuff moving faster than light, but it doesn't matter because it lacks any information. It, in fact, by definition has no information and is thus totally useless in any possible sense.

Quantum entanglement, though, and spooky action at a distance -- that's another kettle of fish. Possibly.

I keep running this theory over in my head that centers on extradimensionality.  That "entropy" is the universe trying to approach flat 4-D space, by pulling the extra dimensions out of the remaining clusters (known as mass/energy).  But I lack the math to explain it properly.

Anyway, in this context neutrinos aren't able to exist in higher-dimensional pockets like an atomic nucleus, they skip right through them (where a photon is absorbed into them and has to be re-emitted).

--Dave

EDIT: Another chink in the Standard Model: Anti-matter particles that do not mirror their standard matter versions. (http://news.yahoo.com/physics-atom-smashers-antimatter-surprise-232412931.html)

It by virtue of its existence is inherently informative.  A switch only needs to be on/off to be useful, you dont need context.  Pile a googleplex of these switches together and you have Creationism.   :oh_i_see:

Scientists did not break speed of light - it was a faulty wire (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9100009/Scientists-did-not-break-speed-of-light-it-was-a-faulty-wire.html)

 :why_so_serious:

So Howard proved Sheldon wrong in the end?

Yeah! Science works again.

Didn't they say the 1st thing they checked and ruled-out after the experiment was faulty wiring in the GPS timing?  Now it's found that it was faulty wiring in the GPS timing.  Something's not right here.  I smell conspiracy!

Assumptions about the speed of particular fiber optics. Plus a potential problem with their GPS timing oscillator that would have skewed results in the other direction (making the neutrinos seem slower than they are). Plenty of potential consistant error to explain 60 nanoseconds.


They're setting up additional tests to be sure.

I have a feeling that they're going to be re-running that experiment over and over and over every time it comes up with faster-than-light particles. The scientific community is pretty fucking defensive of the standard model, and not necessarily in the right way where stuff needs be confirmed/peer-reviewed.

They just need to differentiate between fast neutrinos and regular neutrinos when they publish results, 's'all.

Seriously, did someone put 4chan in charge of CERN or something?   :why_so_serious:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew5YVkJIuq0