It is a concept that forms a cornerstone of our understanding of the universe and the concept of time – nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.
But now it seems that researchers working in one of the world's largest physics laboratories, under a mountain in central Italy, have recorded particles travelling at a speed that is supposedly forbidden by Einstein's theory of special relativity.
Researchers on the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) experiment recorded the arrival times of ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos sent from Cern on a 730km journey through the Earth to the Gran Sasso lab.
The trip would take a beam of light 2.4 milliseconds to complete, but after running the experiment for three years and timing the arrival of 15,000 neutrinos, the scientists discovered that the particles arrived at Gran Sasso sixty billionths of a second earlier, with an error margin of plus or minus 10 billionths of a second.
The result is so unlikely that even the research team is being cautious with its interpretation. Physicists said they would be sceptical of the finding until other laboratories confirmed the result.
gravity distorts space, could the distortion of space by earths(or sols) gravity well explain the discrepancy?
since afaik, they say neutrinos arnt affected by gravity, maybe they arent affected by the space distortion caused by gravity either?
out by possibly 5 nanoseconds in a predicted 2.4 microsecond journey
2.4x10^-3 predicted
off by
5x10^-9 (if i have my powers right. long time since i did real maths)
anyone know if that variance would be in line with the curvature of space?
cant remember shit of the physics i learned.
logic is a sarcastic bitch.
it can slap you in the face with the self evident as easily
as it gives you confidence in your own folly.
~ Skoll
didnt know we looked specifically? since neutrino's come from the core(dont they?) and observable activity is more to do with the surface.
last i heard mention of neutrinos from sol they where checking why we seemed to be getting fewer than predicted.
though sol being the point of origin for neutrinos from sol could have an effect...
ack. lu7tdluvik...
logic is a sarcastic bitch.
it can slap you in the face with the self evident as easily
as it gives you confidence in your own folly.
~ Skoll
A quick search also provides a common line of "if high energy neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light, then we would have seen neutrinos from SN1987a 4.14 years before we saw the light"
i think im not communicating what i mean very well.
im thinking neutrinos are obeying the speed of light, but only seem to go faster in a gravity well.
due to spacetime being slightly distorted within that well, but that neutrinos may seem to be ignoring the effect, or that their own spacetime may be internally overriding the curvature effects we experience, for them.
logic is a sarcastic bitch.
it can slap you in the face with the self evident as easily
as it gives you confidence in your own folly.
~ Skoll
I think I like Skoll's theory. I mean, time tends to go slower as the curvature increases, and if the neutrinos aren't bound to the curvature, they may arrive before photons without necessarily contradicting Einstein.
let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater here lol.
wow! you just found a purpose for life! what are you gonna do next? EPIC FAIL!!!
Michio Kaku is f*cking awesome!
*btw, though I challenge your beliefs, I mean not to offend, but rather to stimulate thought.
Honestly, I think there is definitely something to einsteins theory, the proof is beautifully simple. To that end I would suggest that being as the distance would only have to be calculated to about 18m(less if you consider the lorentz contraction which I havent) off to get this discrepancy it's more likely that they just measured the distance wrong.
Now before I get loads of abuse like "omg they aren't that stupid" think about how you'd actually measure the distance when there is a huge pile of rock in the way? The detectors are stored underground which means there can be no gps. The rock is in the way so you can't just do it with photons. The only way you can do it is to know how far down you are, assuming you dug tangent to the surface of the earth, and how far away across the surface.
Now all that is actually pretty damn hard, very hard to get it exactly right. I study physics at uni and I was talking to one of my lecturers about this, and actually he thought about it for a bit and decided that I was right and that it would be incredibly difficult to measure those distances perfectly.
On the note of faster than light, even though it is contrary to what relativity. We can actually observe (well) things happening faster than light. And it's one of the reasons einstein hated quantum mechanics. The idea that quantum entangled particles could change states simultaneously is contrary to his postulate that information cannot travel faster than light in any frame of reference.
(I.e. the electron can't know that the other electron has flipped instantly, the information can only travel at the speed of light for it to know - however we observe it happening instantaneously as predicted by quantum mechanics)
I don't know what to believe. But it seems that relativity as we know it - applied to gravity predicts dark matter - & I have pretty big issues with that - so maybe there are conditions to relativity that have not yet been thought of.
This pretty much covers the way I feel about it (way better than I could word it).
Basically, it wasn't a perfect method of measurement, and I don't think they should have even said anything about it until they'd repeated the results a few times. Little "OMG GUYS LOOK THE WORLD HAS BEEN CHANGED...wait, LOL JK we were totally wrong," situations from reputable scientific organizations just fuel the fire of crazy reality deniers and add credibility to their ridiculous claims when they're talking to the average people who know nothing about the scientific process.
Yeah there were rumours for a couple of weeks going round our physics department. Unfortunately, it's only something like 99.7% certain so it hasn't officially been "discovered" only "observed" - or something along those lines.
Neutrinos have some mass, gravity will work on them. They get attracted to celestial bodies with a perpendicular angle of entry into the atmosphere. They are very small. I used to think that because neutrinos are always flying through us, that they can cause genetic degradation, going through DNA or RNA and flicking some atoms out of the way, changing the molecular composition, causing mutation. But neutrinos are too small to accomplish this.
The thing about this Swiss - Italy experiment, is that the neutrinos that were clocked faster than photons, were actually moving through the Alps as well. Going faster than the speed of light whilst moving thru bottoms of mountains.
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don't cockbadger it! MROWOWOB The Grape of Naples Posts: 23534
