Faster Than The Speed Of Light

[Rincewind]

likes may be the wrong word but I agree with you. Once they have found the perfect solution then there is nothing left to improve on so they look for the errors. Well something like that if you know what I mean.

[Jon the Hat]

We don't serve no faster than light neutrinos in here, said the barman.

A neutrino goes into a bar.

[Webbo]

We don't serve no faster than light neutrinos in here, said the barman.

A neutrino goes into a bar.

I already heard that joke next week.

[Trav Le Bleu]

I already heard that joke next week.

no genuinely

[jonno24]

Glad to see this thread is getting the coverage it should. This discovery should not be under-estimated.

Also got a letter from Michio Kaku delivered this morning it was unexpected as i was not expecting a reply so soon but to say today has been a good day is an understatement.

[Daggers]

This is nothing new in the world of quantum physics.

*bang*

Pack your boxes and fvck off, scientists. Go discover a new monkey or something.

[Guest]

Since when did Daggers start using Schroedinger's equation as a sig?!

[Magictv]

Since when did Daggers start using Schroedinger's equation as a sig?!

Tomorrow.

I'll get my coat

[jonno24]

Tomorrow.

I'll get my coat

There is no such thing as Tomorrow

Will explain if neccesary

[ACF]

Link

Neutrinos still faster than light in latest version of experiment

Scientists from Cern have repeated their finding of neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. Photograph: Cern/Science Photo Library

The scientists who appeared to have found in September that certain subatomic particles can travel faster than light have ruled out one potential source of error in their measurements after completing a second, fine-tuned version of their experiment.

Their results, posted on the ArXiv preprint server on Friday morning and submitted for peer review in the Journal of High Energy Physics, confirmed earlier measurements that neutrinos, sent through the ground from Cern near Geneva to the Gran Sasso lab in Italy 450 miles (720km) away seemed to travel faster than light.

The finding that neutrinos might break one of the most fundamental laws of physics sent scientists into a frenzy when it was first reported in September. Not only because it appeared to go against Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity but, if correct, the finding opened up the troubling possibility of being able to send information back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect.

The physicist and TV presenter Professor Jim Al-Khalili of the University of Surrey expressed the incredulity of many in the field when he said that if the findings "prove to be correct and neutrinos have broken the speed of light, I will eat my boxer shorts on live TV".

In their original experiment scientists fired beams of neutrinos from Cern to the Gran Sasso lab and the neutrinos seemed to arrive sixty billionths of a second earlier than they should if travelling at the speed of light in a vacuum.

One potential source of error pointed out by other scientists was that the pulses of neutrinos sent by Cern were relatively long, around 10 microseconds each, so measuring the exact arrival time of the particles at Gran Sasso could have relatively large errors. To account for this potential problem in the latest version of the test, the beams sent by Cern were thousands of times shorter – around three nanoseconds – with large gaps of 524 nanoseconds between them. This allowed scientists to time the arrival of the neutrinos at Gran Sasso with greater accuracy.

Writing on his blog when the fine-tuned experiment started last month, Matt Strassler, a theoretical physicist at Rutgers University, said the shorter pulses of neutrinos being sent from Cern to Gran Sasso would remove the need to measure the shape and duration of the beam. "It's like sending a series of loud and isolated clicks instead of a long blast on a horn," he said. "In the latter case you have to figure out exactly when the horn starts and stops, but in the former you just hear each click and then it's already over. In other words, with the short pulses you don't need to know the pulse shape, just the pulse time."

"And you also don't need to measure thousands of neutrinos in order to reproduce the pulse shape, getting the leading and trailing edges just right; you just need a small number – maybe even as few as 10 or so – to check the timing of just those few pulses for which a neutrino makes a splash in Opera."

Around 20 neutrino events have been measured at the Gran Sasso lab in the fine-tuned version of the experiment in the past few weeks, each one precisely associated with a pulse leaving Cern. The scientists concluded from the new measurements that the neutrinos still appeared to be arriving earlier than they should.

"With the new type of beam produced by Cern's accelerators we've been able to to measure with accuracy the time of flight of neutrinos one by one," said Dario Autiero of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). "The 20 neutrinos we recorded provide comparable accuracy to the 15,000 on which our original measurement was based. In addition their analysis is simpler and less dependent on the measurement of the time structure of the proton pulses and its relation to the neutrinos' production mechanism."

In a statement released on Friday, Fernando Ferroni, president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, said: "A measurement so delicate and carrying a profound implication on physics requires an extraordinary level of scrutiny. The experiment at Opera, thanks to a specially adapted Cern beam, has made an important test of consistency of its result. The positive outcome of the test makes us more confident in the result, although a final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world."

Since the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) team at Gran Sasso announced its results, physicists around the world have published scores of online papers trying to explain the strange finding as either the result of a trivial mistake or evidence for new physics.

Dr Carlo Contaldi of Imperial College London suggested that different gravitational effects at Cern and Gran Sasso could have affected the clocks used to measure the neutrinos. Others have come up with ideas about new physics that modify special relativity by taking the unexpected effects of higher dimensions into account.

Despite the latest result, said Autiero, the observed faster-than-light anomaly in the neutrinos' speed from Cern to Gran Sasso needed further scrutiny and independent tests before it could be refuted or confirmed definitively. The Opera experiment will continue to take data with a new muon detector well into next year, to improve the accuracy of the results.

The search for errors is not yet over, according to Jacques Martino, director of the National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics at CNRS. He said that more checks would be under way in future, including ensuring that the clocks at Cern and Gran Sasso were properly synchronised, perhaps by using an optical fibre as opposed to the GPS system used at the moment.

This would remove any potential errors that might occur due to the effects of Einstein's theory of general relativity, which says that clocks tick at different rates depending on the amount of gravitational force they experience – clocks closer to the surface of the Earth tick slower than those further away.

Even a tiny discrepancy between the clocks at Cern and Gran Sasso could be at the root of the faster-than-light results seen in September.

[Leicester Lass]

Wouldn't read too much into it yet, the problems will start if independent measurements from other experiments agree with this one when they're released.

[whoareyaaa]

There is probally stuff in the US already pushing past these speeds, I mean look at the blackbird that broke the speed of light 50 years ago, What do you think they have been doing for the last 60 years.

From what I know the next generation of tech is already built, only time will tell when the US top nuts want to reveal there big toys.

[Rincewind]

It is rumoured that bad news travels faster than light but when it arrives nobody wants to admit the have received it.

[The People's Hero]

You're such a pretty boy. Let me show you what to do and you'll do it.

[samlcfc]

read that these improved their experiments recently and it still happened. They still have to wait for tests from other institutes though

[howlinmadmurfdoc]

There is probally stuff in the US already pushing past these speeds, I mean look at the blackbird that broke the speed of light 50 years ago, What do you think they have been doing for the last 60 years.

From what I know the next generation of tech is already

built, only time will tell when the US top nuts want to reveal there big toys.

Speed of sound?!

[potter3]

There is probally stuff in the US already pushing past these speeds, I mean look at the blackbird that broke the speed of light 50 years ago, What do you think they have been doing for the last 60 years.

From what I know the next generation of tech is already built, only time will tell when the US top nuts want to reveal there big toys.

[Guest shearfox]

There is probally stuff in the US already pushing past these speeds, I mean look at the blackbird that broke the speed of light 50 years ago, What do you think they have been doing for the last 60 years.

From what I know the next generation of tech is already built, only time will tell when the US top nuts want to reveal there big toys.

You mean sound...

You are getting confused, the sound barrier has been broken many times, the light barrier was thought by Einstein to be physically impossible to break. This news contradicts Einsteins special theory of relativity.

[marbelladave]

The most interesting thing about quantum physics is that a series of perfectly understandable events combine in such a way as to produce something totally unexpected. Mostly these experiments are complex and of little relevance to the real world, so to help demonstrate how things work in the quantum universe, i give you the example of the 'Quantum £'.

It goes like this....

Three tradesmen finish a job late and decide to stay overnight. They find a hostel and the manager offers them a room to sleep all three of them for £30. So each man stumps up £10.

After a while the manager decides £30 is a bit steep so gives his assistent £5 to return to the tradesmen, saying he charged them too much,

The assistant goes to the tradesmens room but on the way he is wondering how to split the £5 between the three men, can't be done.

So arriving at the room he gives each of the men £1 and pockets the £2 difference.

The men have thus paid £9 each for the room, ie £10 paid and £1 change, and 3 x £9 is of course £27, the assistant has £2 in his pocket, a total of £29.......

Quantum physics in the real world.......

[danny.]

The manager charged £30 but then refunded £5 = he has £25

The men have £3 each (3 x £1 refund)

The assistant has £2

£25 + £3 + £2 = the £30 the 3 men originally paid

[marbelladave]

The manager charged £30 but then refunded £5 = he has £25

The men have £3 each (3 x £1 refund)

The assistant has £2

£25 + £3 + £2 = the £30 the 3 men originally paid

Yet they paid only £9 each and the assistant has £2 which is of course just £29. The logic of the original statement is irrefutable......

Read it through again and tell me where the 'Quantum £' has gone.

Looking at the same event from two different 'relativities' gaves two different conclusions, the essence of quantum physics.......

[City_4_Life]

Yet they paid only £9 each and the assistant has £2 which is of course just £29. The logic of the original statement is irrefutable......

Read it through again and tell me where the 'Quantum £' has gone.

Looking at the same event from two different 'relativities' gaves two different conclusions, the essence of quantum physics.......

Nothing happen to the missing pound its just the way you explain it.

Each men paid £9 which is £27 in total, the manager got £25 and the assistant got £2, 25+2 =27. Your not trying to make £30 because the men have the £3 back.

[dave the caveman]

Yes that's not quantum physics, it's an old maths riddle. If you change the numbers around a bit you can see how it tricks you.

Say the manager charges £30 but then realises the actual cost is £10 for all of them not £10 each. He gives his assistant £20 to return to the tradesman.

The assistant can't split it, so gives them £6 each and keeps £2 for himself. Now each tradesman has paid £4, totalling £12, and the assistant has £2 which makes £14.

OMG quantum £16? or just a riddle designed to trick you into making a wrong calculation?

[Guest shearfox]

Yes that's not quantum physics, it's an old maths riddle. If you change the numbers around a bit you can see how it tricks you.

Say the manager charges £30 but then realises the actual cost is £10 for all of them not £10 each. He gives his assistant £20 to return to the tradesman.

The assistant can't split it, so gives them £6 each and keeps £2 for himself. Now each tradesman has paid £4, totalling £12, and the assistant has £2 which makes £14.

OMG quantum £16? or just a riddle designed to trick you into making a wrong calculation?

Your right there is no missing pound, it's just an old Maths problem. Most people add the 27 and 2 together when they should be subtracting that amount making 25 which is the amount the clerk received in the end not 30.

[marbelladave]

Yes that's not quantum physics, it's an old maths riddle. If you change the numbers around a bit you can see how it tricks you.

Say the manager charges £30 but then realises the actual cost is £10 for all of them not £10 each. He gives his assistant £20 to return to the tradesman.

The assistant can't split it, so gives them £6 each and keeps £2 for himself. Now each tradesman has paid £4, totalling £12, and the assistant has £2 which makes £14.

OMG quantum £16? or just a riddle designed to trick you into making a wrong calculation?

Your right there is no missing pound, it's just an old Maths problem. Most people add the 27 and 2 together when they should be subtracting that amount making 25 which is the amount the clerk received in the end not 30.

Sorry guys but you are completely missing the point.....

The original post describes a sequence of events that is explained in a way that is consistent in terms of language, logic and arithmatic.

Yet the results are wrong, but the methodology appears to be completely sound. This happens all the time in quantum physics

A sequence of events (experiment) is described and analysed using the criteria that we believe to be correct. At the quantum level, not only do the normal rules of the macro universe not apply but the rules of the quantum universe are neither consistent nor reliable. Observed results not only vary depending on the state of the observer but the very act of observing the event affects the results......

For the non-scientist this is difficult to understand, so I chose the maths problem as a simple allegory to illustrate that looking at things in a logical and consistent way, as the original premise did, is not necessarily correct.

This also helps to explain why scientists discovering particles travelling faster than light, a momentous event in itself, are in the first instance questioning their own methodology, in effect, they are looking for the 'trick' that screwed their experiment.