Particles Suspected of Traveling Faster Than Light
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8782895/CERN-scientists-break-the-speed-of-light.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/22/science-light-idUSL5E7KM4CW20110922
:tinfoil:
Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.
"We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."
If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.
That assertion, which has withstood over a century of testing, is one of the key elements of the so-called Standard Model of physics, which attempts to describe the way the universe and everything in it works.
The totally unexpected finding emerged from research by a physicists working on an experiment dubbed OPERA run jointly by the CERN particle research centre near Geneva and the Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy.
Puzzling results from Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider, have confounded physicists because subatomic particles seem to have beaten the speed of light.
Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away in Italy seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.
The result - which threatens to upend a century of physics - were put online for scrutiny by other scientists.
In the meantime, the group says it is being very cautious about its claims.
They will be discussing the result in detail in a conference at Cern on Friday afternoon, which can be viewed online.
"We tried to find all possible explanations for this," said report author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration.
"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," he told BBC News.
"When you don't find anything, then you say 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.'"
Caught speeding?
The speed of light is the Universe's ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.
Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.
But Dr Ereditato and his colleagues have been carrying out an experiment for the last three years that seems to suggest neutrinos have done just that.
Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another.
The team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, sending them from Cern to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.
In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up 60 billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance - a tiny fractional change, but a consistent one.
The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery.
But the group understands that what are known as "systematic errors" could easily make an erroneous result look like a breaking of the ultimate speed limit, and that has motivated them to publish their measurements.
"My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing - then I would be relieved," Dr Ereditato said.
But for now, he explained, "we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy".
"And of course the consequences can be very serious."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/22/science-light-idUSL5E7KM4CW20110922
GENEVA, Sept 22 (Reuters) - An international team of scientists said on Thursday they had recorded sub-atomic particles travelling faster than light -- a finding that could overturn one of Einstein's long-accepted fundamental laws of the universe.
Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the researchers, told Reuters that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.
"We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."
If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.
That assertion, which has withstood over a century of testing, is one of the key elements of the so-called Standard Model of physics, which attempts to describe the way the universe and everything in it works.
The totally unexpected finding emerged from research by a physicists working on an experiment dubbed OPERA run jointly by the CERN particle research centre near Geneva and the Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy.
A total of 15,000 beams of neutrinos -- tiny particles that pervade the cosmos -- were fired over a period of 3 years from CERN towards Gran Sasso 730 (500 miles) km away, where they were picked up by giant detectors.
Light would have covered the distance in around 2.4 thousandths of a second, but the neutrinos took 60 nanoseconds -- or 60 billionths of a second -- less than light beams would have taken.
"It is a tiny difference," said Ereditato, who also works at Berne University in Switzerland, "but conceptually it is incredibly important. The finding is so startling that, for the moment, everybody should be very prudent."
Ereditato declined to speculate on what it might mean if other physicists, who will be officially informed of the discovery at a meeting in CERN on Friday, found that OPERA's measurements were correct.
"I just don't want to think of the implications," he told Reuters. "We are scientists and work with what we know."
Much science-fiction literature is based on the idea that, if the light-speed barrier can be overcome, time travel might theoretically become possible.
The existence of the neutrino, an elementary sub-atomic particle with a tiny amount of mass created in radioactive decay or in nuclear reactions such as those in the Sun, was first confirmed in 1934, but it still mystifies researchers.
It can pass through most matter undetected, even over long distances, and without being affected. Millions pass through the human body every day, scientists say.
To reach Gran Sasso, the neutrinos pushed out from a special installation at CERN -- also home to the Large Hadron Collider probing the origins of the universe -- have to pass through water, air and rock.
The underground Italian laboratory, some 120 km (75 miles) to the south of Rome, is the largest of its type in the world for particle physics and cosmic research.
Around 750 scientists from 22 different countries work there, attracted by the possibility of staging experiments in its three massive halls, protected from cosmic rays by some 1,400 metres (4,200 feet) of rock overhead.
:tinfoil:
Comments
Perhaps I wasn't!
I mean what in the universe were they using to relate the speed to? earth? I mean wow, come on, earths moving through the universe at some crazy enormous speed right?
The speed of light sure does seem relative to the speed were moving through the universe, meaning once again, it is just a measurement of relative speed. Not a limit.
100 years ago people thought we couldn't move faster than the speed of sound too.
This is merely someone else finally being able to prove to the world that, it is actually very possible. Because for some reason, 90% of the world if not more, seem to think Einstein was always right about everything unconditionally because he helped make nuclear bombs, and come up with a calculation for energy.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light#Measurement
I think it is too early to say if these particles are actually faster than light or not
Nope.. they'll just figure out nothing moves faster than time!
err, time is subjective -not a constant at all.
says the books
feck
So it all boils down to the fact that we know nothing, except for when we discover things, in which case we know a little less of nothing.
Human race FTW
Here's what I believe: Light just moves away from the object that is emitting the light, at 300,000 km/sec, relative to the object's own speed.
The light-emitting object just can't move faster than the speed at which the light is moving away from it. Light coming from a "fast object" is faster than light coming from a "slow" object.
If a flare is shot from a flare pistol at X m/sec, the light that is being emitted from the flare would move at a speed of 300,000,000 m/sec + X m/sec. (The flare emits light in every possible direction, but I'll stick to the light that is moving in the same direction of the flare)
Other example: a train represents a light-emitting object, a passenger walking forward in the train represents the photons emitted.
The passenger walks forward in the train, in the direction the train is moving. The passenger makes a walking motion of the train's speed + the passenger's own speed. The train cannot travel faster than the passenger, because no matter how much more the train accelerates, the speed of the passenger's walking motion is always increased with the train's speed. If the train is moving at 100 km/h and the passenger walks forward in the train at 5 km/h (relative to the train), the passenger is moving at 105 km/h. If the train then accelerates with 20 km/h, then the passenger is moving at 125 km/h as long as he keeps walking forward.
Actually better yet, think about this. The suns on the outskirts of the milky way spinning around it right? Which means that the milky way would be the center of our gravitational zone. But then there's a bunch of galaxy's which are all apparently moving outward. So the center of our galaxy cant be the center of the universe.
Anyway basing this bit here off of a explanation kind of like shrimps. If we listen to the theories currently in place we have to start off with a good metaphorical comparison to what we currently have.
You wake up in a train, your stuck in a cabin with no windows and no way of knowing what way the trains going or where your at. You find a ball. You stand against each of the 4 walls one at a time throwing the ball at the opposite wall as hard as you can measuring the speed in each direction.
_____Red
Green____Blue
____Orange
you get 50MPH to the red wall, 20MPH to the Blue wall, 50MPH to the Orange wall and 80MPH to the Green Wall
You can derive the max speed for the ball is 50MPH, that the train is moving 30MPH in the same direction as the Blue wall, but still don't know where the origin point is.
Now say that the walls are all points of the earth around the rotation of the sun. Red and Orange would be normal times, Green and Blue though would be lava eruptions, and ice ages every year seasonal...
I haven't heard of or seen anything that incorporates how the sun would provide the earth light faster on one side, or slower on another. Or that over hundreds of years how that would change by the rotation of the Solar System around the Milky way. And as it goes for time dilation thing. All I am going to say with the clocks is, centripetal force.
Space is a mass-less fluid and has the possible ability to shift in such a way as to allow a massive object to travel in a straight line faster than a photon in the same "vacuum" of space.
True or false? Can it be proven?
As for the train/ball example, the ball will inherit the velocity of the train, and the difference between walls should be negligible. In a vacuum even more so.
Which leads to my interpretation of the meaning of life.. Does life really exist?, no, then why is it there?, to prove itself existant!
Don't worry, I have actual scientific material to back my wild speculations:
once again spoiler tags are deployed in the benefit of humans
So im sure that going over the speed of light in a medium would be... a fireball (maybe even plasma ball at that speed) of friction induced failure (as stated, becoming a form of energy, probabley thermal), but in a vacuum, you would have to have a reference point to really know how fast you were going anyway, because there is no medium to make a speed of light basis off of.
So if the ball inherits the speed of the train (metaphor for light, and sun) then... in comparison to the ground (the reference point) at a 50mph throw forward in the train going 30mph the ball would be going 80mph in comparison to the ground, but if the max speed is 50mph, that would be impossible.
You know what, well just have an experiment, you make your high power space cruiser, Ill make mine, well see if we can break this "speed limit" or not. :P
Oh BTW: space isn't a fluid, its space, defined in simple terms as "an infinite lack there of:"
Also, I figured out a new tittle for this thread
"Particles Suspected of Traveling Faster Than Light, Light to Demand Compensation"
I'm quite excited at the prospect of faster-than-light particles, but this early on it's hard to tell if we've really made a scientific breakthrough, or if someone just screwed up when it came to the numbers.
Light, on the other hand, consists of particles that make an actual long-distance movement, so the photons that are fired from the light source could actually inherit (at least some of) the speed of the light source.
And "THE" speed of sound doesn't exist, for example: sound "moves" a lot faster in water than it does in air.