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  1. #1
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    Default 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 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 – the European particle physics laboratory – timed to coincide with the publication of a research paper (pdf) 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/20...?newsfeed=true
    If you also agree that an animals suffering should be avoided rather than encouraged, consider what steps you can take.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Noir View Post
    W00t, warp drives here we come!
    "Government screws up everything. If government says black, you can bet it's white. If government says sit still for your safety, you'd better run for your life!"
    --Wayne Allyn Root
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    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.
    It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. The freeman of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. James Madison
    Live as free people, yet without employing your freedom as a pretext for wickedness; but live at all times as servants of God.
    1 Peter 2:16

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    ^To a pre-warp society? Good luck with that.
    "when socialism fails, blame capitalism and demand more socialism." - A friend
    "You know the difference between libs and right-wingers? Libs STFU when evidence refutes their false beliefs." - Another friend
    “Don't waste your time with explanations: people only hear what they want to hear.” - Paulo Coelho


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    If you also agree that an animals suffering should be avoided rather than encouraged, consider what steps you can take.

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    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....
    How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin. - Ronald Reagan

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    If neutrinos have mass and are travelling faster than light, we've got all kinds of problems.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Thunderknuckles View Post
    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....
    How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin. - Ronald Reagan

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    Quote Originally Posted by KarlMarx View Post
    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
    If you also agree that an animals suffering should be avoided rather than encouraged, consider what steps you can take.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Noir View Post
    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
    How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin. - Ronald Reagan

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    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?
    If you also agree that an animals suffering should be avoided rather than encouraged, consider what steps you can take.

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    Quote Originally Posted by KarlMarx View Post
    Well, it was worth a try
    Well given the wiriness of quantum mechanics you may be right, and wrong, and both lol.
    If you also agree that an animals suffering should be avoided rather than encouraged, consider what steps you can take.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Noir View Post
    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...
    How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin. - Ronald Reagan

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    Quote Originally Posted by KarlMarx View Post
    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.
    "when socialism fails, blame capitalism and demand more socialism." - A friend
    "You know the difference between libs and right-wingers? Libs STFU when evidence refutes their false beliefs." - Another friend
    “Don't waste your time with explanations: people only hear what they want to hear.” - Paulo Coelho


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    well, i think it's safe to say that all our ideas on physics have been destroyed.

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