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

[Oni-Paranoia]

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]

Originally Posted by Reach

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:

Originally Posted by Wineandbread

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]

Originally Posted by alainbryden

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:

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]

Originally Posted by darkshark

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]

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.

[PaperclipGames]

Originally Posted by Oni-Paranoia

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

The God Particle is the nickname of the Higg's particle, which is supposedly the thing that causes any matter to contain mass, and it is responsible for the Higg's field, which results in gravity.
It is vaguely related. Light is (or is it?) the fastest particle in the world because it has no mass - or rather, no rest mass. This implies that if something would go faster than light, it would have a negative amount of mass, which is obviously nonsense (or is it?).

[Reach]

Originally Posted by MrGiggles

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

edit:
^

You're right, the media does love this type of stuff.


The main article is so completely bereft of information though. I've had to do a lot of reading on the side.

It still doesn't make a lick of sense, so I'll be curious to see what the explanation for this is eventually. It goes beyond my field of expertise though, so I probably shouldn't comment further, other than on this:

The God Particle is the nickname of the Higg's particle, which is supposedly the thing that causes any matter to contain mass, and it is responsible for the Higg's field, which results in gravity.
It is vaguely related. Light is (or is it?) the fastest particle in the world because it has no mass - or rather, no rest mass. This implies that if something would go faster than light, it would have a negative amount of mass, which is obviously nonsense (or is it?).

The two aren't really related.

E = mc2/sqrt(1 - v2/c2)

Is why a particle can't move faster than the speed of light. Any particle of mass m would require an infinite amount of energy to reach c, which is why the entire idea of 'faster than light' doesn't make any sense, and any particle without any mass must move at exactly c.

[TheNoSoMan]

reach and rubix really do know their physics.

Somehow, they sound really interesting.

[Magic_V2]

If this doesn't boil down to user error;
Maybe the speed of light is evolving, and neutrinos are just going along with the flow.
Did they already re-check the value of light speed, or just assume it's a constant?

If I were you, reading this post would make me laugh.

[PaperclipGames]

Originally Posted by Reach

The two aren't really related.

E = mc2/sqrt(1 - v2/c2)

Is why a particle can't move faster than the speed of light. Any particle of mass m would require an infinite amount of energy to reach c, which is why the entire idea of 'faster than light' doesn't make any sense, and any particle without any mass must move at exactly c.

Obviously. That is why there is this huge fuss about the measurement. E=mc² would be proven false if the neutrinos actually did go faster than light (and with that, many other formulas would also no longer be very trustworthy anymore).

It is related to the Higg's particle in the sense that the Higg's particle is responsible for anything to have said mass m in the first place (but no more than that).

[Reach]

Originally Posted by PaperclipGames

Obviously. That is why there is this huge fuss about the measurement. E=mc² would be proven false if the neutrinos actually did go faster than light (and with that, many other formulas would also no longer be very trustworthy anymore).

It is related to the Higg's particle in the sense that the Higg's particle is responsible for anything to have said mass m in the first place (but no more than that).

I'm not quite sure this would be the case.

We didn't throw out Newton's equations when Einstein came around. They still work, just not when talking about certain things.

A single exception to this equation wouldn't necessarily mean that it's wrong, especially when it adequately describes 99.999999999% of everything in the universe.

We would, however, require an additional model to explain what the hell is going on here XD

[A2P]

Usain Bolt

[vantilburg]

Faster than lightning

[ELRayford]

Quantum Computers before 2050?

[dragonmegaXX]

I dont get how this really is going to change anything that matters...

[hi19hi19]

Originally Posted by dragonmegaXX

I dont get how this really is going to change anything that matters...

It's making a bunch of egghead types shit their collective pants, which is kind of amusing to watch from a distance.


But really? Nothing changes, you're right.

[rushyrulz]

*takes advantage of this momentary physics anomaly and uses new-found telekinetic powers to take over the world*

[YoshL]

Originally Posted by rushyrulz

*takes advantage of this momentary physics anomaly and uses new-found telekinetic powers to take over the world*

too late i got there first

[rushyrulz]

shit.

[PaperclipGames]

Originally Posted by Reach

I'm not quite sure this would be the case.

We didn't throw out Newton's equations when Einstein came around. They still work, just not when talking about certain things.

A single exception to this equation wouldn't necessarily mean that it's wrong, especially when it adequately describes 99.999999999% of everything in the universe.

We would, however, require an additional model to explain what the hell is going on here XD

Hm, yeah, alright, fair enough. :P
E=mc² still counts in the ways we have already used it (nuclear fusion for example) so there's no need for it to go. But we'd indeed have to find out new formulas for these special occasions.