View Full Version : Faster than light particles potentially found
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 largestphysics (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/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.
Scientists at the Gran Sasso facility will unveil evidence on Friday that raises the troubling possibility of a way to send information back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect.
They will announce the result at a special seminar at Cern (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/cern) – the European particle physics (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/particlephysics) laboratory – timed to coincide with the publication of a research paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897) (pdf (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897v1)) describing the experiment.
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 measurement amounts to the neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light by a fraction of 20 parts per million. Since the speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second, the neutrinos were evidently travelling at 299,798,454 metres per second
The Opera group said it hoped the physics community would scrutinise the result and help uncover any flaws in the measurement, or verify it with their own experiments.
"When you get such a result you want to make sure you made no mistakes, that there are no nasty things going on you didn't think of. We spent months and months doing checks and we have not been able to find any errors.
full story - http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/22/faster-than-light-particles-neutrinos?newsfeed=true
DragonStryk72
09-23-2011, 09:53 AM
full story - http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/22/faster-than-light-particles-neutrinos?newsfeed=true
W00t, warp drives here we come!
revelarts
09-23-2011, 11:14 AM
Cool light speed no longer the fastest thing in the universe.
Maybe a scientist from the future could send a message back in time to explain it all.
fj1200
09-23-2011, 11:22 AM
^To a pre-warp society? Good luck with that. :slap:
2007-07-18-timetravel.gif (http://wonderfactory.org/comics/2007-07-18-timetravel.gif)
KarlMarx
09-23-2011, 11:57 AM
Another class of particles, tachyons, have been postulated. Those particles have imaginary mass (not kidding), meaning that they cannot travel *slower* than the speed of light... the math is kind of spacy, just google imaginary numbers and you'll see what I mean....
maybe nuetrinos turn into tachyons under certain conditions. Then the tachyons are travelling near the speed of light but slightly faster then turn back into nuetrinos without the transition being detected... making it appear as if the nuetrinos are travelling slightly faster than the speed of light....
Thunderknuckles
09-23-2011, 01:36 PM
If neutrinos have mass and are travelling faster than light, we've got all kinds of problems.
KarlMarx
09-23-2011, 07:03 PM
If neutrinos have mass and are travelling faster than light, we've got all kinds of problems.
I wasn't suggesting that neutrinos are travelling faster than light. It is possible that they are temporarily converted to tachyons then almost immediately converted back to nuetrinos. Of course, that theory has problems. First there is the conservation of mass principal... how do you convert something with little or no mass into something that has imaginary mass and still conserve mass? The answer may be something like this... nuetrinos' mass is a complex number (having both real and imaginary components).... by some mechanism... the real component is transformed into the imaginary component for a slight instant.... the mass of the particle can be expressed as
square root of (a**2 + i*b**2)... where a is the real component of the mass and b is the imaginary component of the mass and i is the square root of -1....
by some mechanism the entire mass is converted into imaginary mass equal to i * square root (a**2 + b**2).... that may take care of the conservation of mass problem....
I wasn't suggesting that neutrinos are travelling faster than light. It is possible that they are temporarily converted to tachyons then almost immediately converted back to nuetrinos. Of course, that theory has problems. First there is the conservation of mass principal... how do you convert something with little or no mass into something that has imaginary mass and still conserve mass? The answer may be something like this... nuetrinos' mass is a complex number (having both real and imaginary components).... by some mechanism... the real component is transformed into the imaginary component for a slight instant.... the mass of the particle can be expressed as
square root of (a**2 + i*b**2)... where a is the real component of the mass and b is the imaginary component of the mass and i is the square root of -1....
by some mechanism the entire mass is converted into imaginary mass equal to i * square root (a**2 + b**2).... that may take care of the conservation of mass problem....
Even if that happens, the recomposition of mass means that the information (which is the mass) is traveling at speeds faster than light
KarlMarx
09-24-2011, 06:23 PM
Even if that happens, the recomposition of mass means that the information (which is the mass) is traveling at speeds faster than light
Well, it was worth a try
Something i don;t quite understand about this.
If these particles are traveling faster than light, does that not mean that by definition they are traveling back in time?
and thus arriving sixty billionths of a second before they left the original starting chamber?
Well, it was worth a try
Well given the wiriness of quantum mechanics you may be right, and wrong, and both lol.
KarlMarx
09-28-2011, 07:14 PM
Something i don;t quite understand about this.
If these particles are traveling faster than light, does that not mean that by definition they are traveling back in time?
and thus arriving sixty billionths of a second before they left the original starting chamber?
at speeds faster than light, time becomes imaginary, not negative.... I don't know what that the implications of imaginary time are...
fj1200
09-29-2011, 05:40 AM
at speeds faster than light, time becomes imaginary, not negative.... I don't know what that the implications of imaginary time are...
That's the time in which the stimulus program becomes effective.
cadet
11-11-2011, 10:13 AM
well, i think it's safe to say that all our ideas on physics have been destroyed.
Thunderknuckles
02-22-2012, 06:20 PM
UPDATE:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/22/loose-wire-led-to-stunning-faster-than-light-particle-finding/
"
A loose connection between a timer and a computer led some of the world’s smartest particle physicists to conclude that certain tiny particles called neutrinos moved faster than the speed of light"
:laugh::laugh::laugh:
Brings me back to my Physics classes where my teacher always reminded us to check our connections when something didn't work right.
UPDATE:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/22/loose-wire-led-to-stunning-faster-than-light-particle-finding/
"
A loose connection between a timer and a computer led some of the world’s smartest particle physicists to conclude that certain tiny particles called neutrinos moved faster than the speed of light"
:laugh::laugh::laugh:
Brings me back to my Physics classes where my teacher always reminded us to check our connections when something didn't work right.
Just shows how through the testing is that after 5 months they were still testing and after all that they found it to be a loose wire. If nothing else its speaks to the integrity of science.
Dilloduck
02-22-2012, 08:55 PM
Just shows how through the testing is that after 5 months they were still testing and after all that they found it to be a loose wire. If nothing else its speaks to the integrity of science.
In your dreams---they were hoping like hell to be famous for a discovery and alas--they failed. Scientists are wanna be gods and have lots of followers who can't stand the idea of a real God.
In your dreams---they were hoping like hell to be famous for a discovery and alas--they failed. Scientists are wanna be gods and have lots of followers who can't stand the idea of a real God.
You're right, it was in my dreams, they didn't spend half a year reviewing the data and redoing the test to make sure there was no errors, and subsequently found errors, i made all that up.
What actually happened is the scientist who was the head of the operation has declared himself GOD, and i have no reason to think that he isn't, a pleb like you and I may only refer to him as The One PBTH (Praise Be To Him) to address The One PBTH in any other such way is heresy, payable only by the removal of your genatalia which will then be presented to The One PBTH as an offering.
^,^
Dilloduck
02-22-2012, 09:20 PM
You're right, it was in my dreams, they didn't spend half a year reviewing the data and redoing the test to make sure there was no errors, and subsequently found errors, i made all that up.
What actually happened is the scientist who was the head of the operation has declared himself GOD, and i have no reason to think that he isn't, a pleb like you and I may only refer to him as The One PBTH (Praise Be To Him) to address The One PBTH in any other such way is heresy, payable only by the removal of your genatalia which will then be presented to The One PBTH as an offering.
^,^
That would be far too much of an offering for a test tube spinner. :laugh2:
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