Speed of light exceeded?

Mike Pryce

Mike Pryce

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News that neutrinos fired from Cern to a lab near Rome arrived sooner than expected, and faster than the speed of light:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484

Apparently similar results were also found in the US in 2007, but the margin of error was too great to say if the speed of light was exceeded, according to the BBC's Newsnight.

If this holds up then it's 'Millennium Falcon here we come'!
 
I'm interested in this, but I'd really prefer for more extensive testing to be done. To accept this as fact would require rewriting a good bit of what we know about the quantum world and causality.

It doesn't necessarily mean that we've found a way to make a warp drive though; if we can't replicate the results with normal matter then we won't be sending ships faster than light with the technique.
 
Neutrinos are odd little particles, but they have positive mass and energy. Thus being true tachyons seems unlikely. What may happen is that neutrinos do a bit of quantum tunnelling... not a lot, just enough to make 'em FTL over this distance. For all I know, neutrinos may do their quantum tunnelling in the 600 to 700 km range... none before, none after. This would make them STL in standard lab experiments, and apparently STL over interstellar distances, where a brief 60 nanosecond burst of speed doesn't mean squat over trip times of millions of years.
 
OK, the article says: "Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early".

The speed of light depends on the medium through which the photons travels. One very important question here is: Which "speed of light" are they comparing to? Speed of light in a vacuum? Speed of light through the ground between CERN and Gran Sasso? And if the latter, could the discrepancy in travel time be explained through differences in the soil/rock/etc. composition? I would expect, though, that the clever people at CERN have eliminated this possibility.

Please feel free to tell me if I'm talking out of my you-know-what :)

Regards & all,

Thomas L. Nielsen
Luxembourg
 
Lauge said:
OK, the article says: "Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early".

The speed of light depends on the medium through which the photons travels. One very important question here is: Which "speed of light" are they comparing to? Speed of light in a vacuum? Speed of light through the ground between CERN and Gran Sasso? And if the latter, could the discrepancy in travel time be explained through differences in the soil/rock/etc. composition? I would expect, though, that the clever people at CERN have eliminated this possibility.

Please feel free to tell me if I'm talking out of my you-know-what :)

Regards & all,

Thomas L. Nielsen
Luxembourg
Click to expand...
Particles moving faster than light through material mediums has been known of for quite some time. Know the blue glow in those water tanks where fission fuel is kept in nuclear reactors? That's Cerenkov Radiation which is released by radioactive decay products exceeding light speed in the water. Since neutrinos are so unreactive, I imagine that they travel faster than light though a huge number of material mediums than light itself does.

They must be talking about lightspeed in a vacuum or else this wouldn't be much of a discovery.
 
Another article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15034414

Although for a neutrino solid rock is almost as good as a vacuum, the speed of light is supposed to be a solid wall, speed-wise. That's why the European researchers have put their results out - they can hardly believe it themselves.

Sitting writing this a few yards from where Rutherford first split the atom, and having lunch with some scientist colleagues, the interesting thing is how suddenly the 'impossible' is being considered as possible. Probably it is an experimental error, but if not it will be absolutely fascinating to see what happens next.

Skepticsm is essential to science, but allowing in the 'impossible' is also important too, if the evidence indicates it.
 
Sistematic doubt, relativism and the uncertainty principle have open many to questions to science, without answering any. Perhaps this is a good moment in time to change the current paradigm and open the stelar gate.
 
Last years CERN has quite an interesting marketing approach. To justify their funding and acquire as many grants as possible, they are creating interesting press releases that can attract world media and general public, but have little scientific value. The real results behind it are also good, but lets say less fascinating for the ordinary man. Something like:

We will reborn the dinosaurs if we found their usable DNA

The speed of light exceeded but to be sure to say that, we need additional 20 years of research.

In contrast with what is written in the ordinary school books of physics, the theory of relativity allows particles/energy to travel faster than speed of light. The point is, that the particle/energy must travel faster than speed of light all its life and it cant be slower. Also the particle that is slower than the speed of light and has any weight, cant travel faster. According to our current knowledge level, this is impossible. Regarding the actual theme, what they can measure relatively good is the time, however I am not sure, that they can measure with the sufficient precise the distance (all the path, where the neutrinos were travelling). All this "breaking news" has only one reason: "There is the small chance that we can make a great discovery, so give us another money to find out, if really."
 
from http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,9767.0.html
Justo Miranda
· Secret Projects Master
· Senior Member
No need to be alarmed. The Geneva scientists are of the civil servant type. They are usually more interested in keeping their jobs, analyzing data, than in publishing new discoveries that might provoke the ecologists or provide arguments to the religious leaders for cutting their budgets.

Would they be in the NASA, they would use the Mercury orbit to launch a space probe to Saturn, thus extending the length of the project as much as possible.
They would not discover or publish anything useful, specially nothing related to gravity and the Higgs Boson.
Nobody wishes to be Darwin nowadays.
 
I know the speed of photons varies due to 'constraints' such as medium density, wave-guide or gravity well. IIRC, there must be arcane corrections to GPS satellites' clocks due to their motion...

{ Apparent 'c+' result could be as simple as overlooking the Earth's oblateness, or proximity to Alps' mascon... ;- }

IMHO, anything that challenges and possibly extends 'Standard Model' is good. One loop-hole might result from neutrinos' ability to morph between different types. Having some sort of tunneling effect kick in might tell us about the transition state.

FWIW, I'm unhappy about the current hunt for assorted shades of 'Dark Matter'. Given that both 'usual' and 'unusual' suspects fail to show, I've been heard to mutter about 'epicycles'...

One unhappy 'gotcha' may be that there's NO Dark Matter here-abouts due to the 'Local Bubble'...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Bubble
 
Reality has confirmed my prediction of last September. Scientists of the CERN believe to have a loose cable ::)
 

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Justo Miranda said:
Reality has confirmed my prediction of last September. Scientists of the CERN believe to have a loose cable ::)
Click to expand...
:eek: ... ;D
 
...and Einstein is disappointed, yet again - no real surprise for us cynics.
 

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