Scientists may have found a particle that goes fast than light.

[GG_Guru]

Re: Scientists may have found a particle that goes fast than light.

Rubix just mind fucced my brain. Holy shit. lol

I am surprised to see how far this goes actually, if Einstein's theory can be supped then it would most certainly be an impressive feat to say the least.

[massflavour]

Re: Scientists may have found a particle that goes fast than light.

Whoever deleted my post is a tight-ass that needs to be de-modded for being a tight-ass. My post didn't contain anything bad and was related to the topic. there are other posts in this thread that should also have been deleted if my post deserved to be deleted. just because my name is pure genius you delete my posts. You really deserve to be demodded for deleting posts out of pure idiocy.

best post in thread so far

[stargroup100]

Re: Scientists may have found a particle that goes fast than light.

What Rubix said pretty much.

lmao at everyone going "OH NOES THIS CHANGES MY WORLD" i'm pretty sure this kind of discovery would have no direct influence on ANY of our lives

[Reach]

Re: Scientists may have found a particle that goes fast than light.

These kind of things pop up every couple of years.

And they're always wrong, in some way, shape or form.

It's usually an issue of group vs phase velocities (phase velocity can exceed c).

If this isn't the case, which it doesn't appear to be, then it's measurement error. Not only does it make no god damn sense whatsoever, but right now it's a dubious and unverified claim. You'd think whatever researcher is leading this experiment would have been smart enough to know this is an error and double checked and fixed his shit before ejaculating all over the media.


Best case scenario for this experiment is it's some sort of exception because of strange experimental conditions.

[SocoNhydro420]

Re: Scientists may have found a particle that goes fast than light.

Yeah i read that article yesterday, i think they might have made some sort of calibration error somewhere.

Even though i think they made an error, i actually hope that they didn't. If its true, it means theres something new to uncover, and physics will get a lot more exciting for the theorists (future me)

[Wineandbread]

Re: Scientists may have found a particle that goes fast than light.

Scientists working on OPERA/Neutrino velocity haven't been unearthing these results just now. If you look at Rubix's paper's introduction, you see that the experiment has been going on for a few years (onwards of 2009).

The paper was published because CERN scientists are at a loss and want external sources to analyze their work and look for an error/prove their analysis wrong. If it ends up being some calibration error, well... lol.
(http://www.rferl.org/content/cern_ex.../24338924.html)

The media has pretty much exploded on it though first thing when it came out and blew it out of proportion like they do for plenty of other things xd

[rushyrulz]

Re: Scientists may have found a particle that goes fast than light.

Government is prolly like, okay we're gonna stop funding you now.
BUT WAIT NEUTRINOS GO FASTER THAN C!

Oh, in that case..

[Thatskier]

Re: Scientists may have found a particle that goes fast than light.








/end thread

[darkshark]

Re: Scientists may have found a particle that goes fast than light.

What if it's not a calibration error? The existence of tachyonic neutrinos has been a concept for a while now. Tachyons can't move slower than the speed of light. If this turns out to be true, then it would just prove their existence, not rewrite history.

[PaperclipGames]

Re: Scientists may have found a particle that goes fast than light.

Calibration errors are considered dealt with, considering they have set a max measurement error margin of 10 nanoseconds - which is, relatively speaking, not all that little. If they measure a speed that exceeds this margin by no less than six times, you know that something really strange must be going on that isn't "just" a measurement error.

I personally don't think neutrinos can go faster than the speed of light, I think someone's been messing around with the results.

[Oni-Paranoia]

Re: Scientists may have found a particle that goes fast than light.

How about we all look at the possible positives if this is true. Every comment is how it can be fake, false, error, lies, misunderstood, joke, funding needs, etc...

Let's take in the fact we don't know everything about the universe and that this could be an awesome discovery. I haven't done too much reading but I assume this was done by the LHC which hasn't been around all that long so new discoveries should be happening more often in anything.

There was also a statement about a "God Particle" not so long ago. Possibly any relation?

[MrGiggles]

Re: Scientists may have found a particle that goes fast than light.

You'd think whatever researcher is leading this experiment would have been smart enough to know this is an error and double checked and fixed his shit before ejaculating all over the media.

I think it's the other way around. The media is jizzing all over the experiment.

edit:

The paper was published because CERN scientists are at a loss and want external sources to analyze their work and look for an error/prove their analysis wrong. If it ends up being some calibration error, well... lol.
(http://www.rferl.org/content/cern_ex.../24338924.html)

The media has pretty much exploded on it though first thing when it came out and blew it out of proportion like they do for plenty of other things xd

^

[ninjaKIWI]

Re: Scientists may have found a particle that goes fast than light.

I read the article published with their findings. It looks like they took an insane amount of care with their measurement of distance and time.

One of the most common skepticism of people who no nothing about the experiment is stuff like:

you might worry about[...] have they correctly accounted for the time delay of actually reading out the signals? Whatever you are using as a timing signal, that has to travel down the cables to your computer and when you are talking about nanoseconds, you have to know exactly how quickly the current travels, and it is not instantaneous.

This experiment doesn't use that sort of 'stopwatch' timing mechanism though. There is no 'T=0', and no single firing of neutrinos. What is detected is watermark patterns in the steady stream of particles. The streams at the input and output are time stamped using the same satellites and any position along each stream has a precise time associated with it. By identifying identical patterns at input and output streams, they can identify how long it took particles to travel between the points.



As for distance, they use GPS readings to get the east, north, and altitude position along the path travelled to great precision. So much so that they even detect slow earth crust migration and millimetres of changes in distance between source and destination when something like an earthquake occurs. When your particles are travelling on the scale (730534.61 ± 0.20) metres, this is more than enough precision:



It's going to take a lot more than grassroots brainstorming to think of what could have caused this discrepancy. I've seen suggestions such as the gravity of the earth being different along the path of the neutrinos, which warps space/time unevenly. The neutrino might not actually be travelling as far as they think if space/time is contracted at one or more points along the path where gravity varies.

Anyways, I'll be interested in seeing how it pans out. Like most scientists, my guess is an unaccounted for systematic error (because they definitely have statistical significance and precision and on their side) that has yet to be pointed out, but it probably won't take too long with all the theoretical physicists that will be pouring through this experiment.

Post Alain made on FFYa that I thought you guys might like to see.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Scientists may have found a particle that goes fast than light.

What if it's not a calibration error? The existence of tachyonic neutrinos has been a concept for a while now. Tachyons can't move slower than the speed of light. If this turns out to be true, then it would just prove their existence, not rewrite history.

I'm not going to get into nitty gritty details, but they are most definitely not tachyonic. The speed of anything tachyonic increases as its energy decreases *by definition*. The neutrinos in the OPERA experiment had higher energy (not lower) than the supernova SN 1987A neutrinos, which means they should have been slower if they were tachyonic (which isn't what we saw experimentally).

Tachyons are what you get when you fiddle with certain values of the mathematics -- it doesn't mean they exist or make any physical sense (especially since they must have imaginary mass because the equation calls for the square root of a negative when v>c). They've got spacelike worldlines, which means that even if they did exist, we wouldn't be able to know about them anyway. They're interesting to talk about, but there's good reason to simply treat them as non-existent mathematical concepts.

It's been a pop-science media buzzword-conclusion to jump to tachyons because that's what we normally think of when we think of FTL particles, but there are other properties that must be present that we don't see in this particular experiment.

The reason why this experiment is so weird is because they're pretty sure they've set everything up correctly, and yet the results are completely at odds with what was expected. It's like when you're coding something and you keep getting a particular result showing up when you've checked everything over a billion and six times. Eventually you'll find something embarrassing and get values you expect.

Having c be the absolute speed limit has worked so well and so consistently in both the large astronomical arenas as well as the incredibly small quantum realms -- suddenly having something be able to travel faster than light and yet interact with bradyonic mass is just nonsensical. If this were true, it would be a massive shattering of physics.

Of course, the more likely solution is systematic error given the nature of neutrinos and the way the experiment was set up.

[Spenner]

Re: Scientists may have found a particle that goes fast than light.

Science "fact" is just how best we know something at the current date... think of the different atomic models. I'm open to some new awesome discoveries; but with little info on the "finding" it's not really for us to say the legitimacy of it yet, I'm sure the theoretical physicists working on it will know better than anyone after they finish revising it.