What's faster than the speed of light!?

[BFM_SüprM@ñ]

Well, don't look at me... I have a bullet beat easily, but the speed of light is a whole different car class.

GENEVA —One of the very pillars of physics and Einstein's theory of relativity —that nothing can go faster than the speed of light —was rocked Thursday by new findings from one of the world's foremost laboratories. European researchers said they clocked an oddball type of subatomic particle called a neutrino going faster than the 186,282 miles per second that has long been considered the cosmic speed limit. The claim was met with skepticism, with one outside physicist calling it the equivalent of saying you have a flying carpet. In fact, the researchers themselves are not ready to proclaim a discovery and are asking other physicists to independently try to verify their findings. "The feeling that most people have is this can't be right, this can't be real," said James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, which provided the particle accelerator that sent neutrinos on their breakneck 454-mile trip underground from Geneva to Italy. Going faster than light is something that is just not supposed to happen according to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity —the one made famous by the equation E equals mc2. But no one is rushing out to rewrite the science books just yet. It is "a revolutionary discovery if confirmed," said Indiana University theoretical physicist Alan Kostelecky, who has worked on this concept for a quarter of a century. Stephen Parke, who is head theoretician at the Fermilab near Chicago and was not part of the research, said: "It's a shock. It's going to cause us problems, no doubt about that —if it's true." Even if these results are confirmed, they won't change at all the way we live or the way the world works. After all, these particles have presumably been speed demons for billions of years. But the finding will fundamentally alter our understanding of how the universe operates, physicists said. Einstein's special relativity theory, which says that energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, underlies "pretty much everything in modern physics," said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment. "It has worked perfectly up until now." France's National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research collaborated with Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory on the experiment at CERN. CERN reported that a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometers) away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds. (A nanosecond is one-billionth of a second.) Given the enormous implications of the find, the researchers spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there were no flaws in the experiment. A team at Fermilab had similar faster-than-light results in 2007, but a large margin of error undercut its scientific significance. If anything is going to throw a cosmic twist into Einstein's theories, it's not surprising that it's the strange particles known as neutrinos. These are odd slivers of an atom that have confounded physicists for about 80 years. The neutrino has almost no mass, comes in three different "flavors," may have its own antiparticle and has been seen shifting from one flavor to another while shooting out from our sun, said physicist Phillip Schewe, communications director at the Joint Quantum Institute in Maryland. Columbia University physicist Brian Greene, author of the book "Fabric of the Cosmos," said neutrinos theoretically can travel at different speeds depending on how much energy they have. And some mysterious particles whose existence is still only theorized could be similarly speedy, he said. Fermilab team spokeswoman Jenny Thomas, a physics professor at the University College of London, said there must be a "more mundane explanation" for the European findings. She said Fermilab's experience showed how hard it is to measure accurately the distance, time and angles required for such a claim. Nevertheless, Fermilab, which shoots neutrinos from Chicago to Minnesota, has already begun working to try to verify or knock down the new findings. And that's exactly what the team in Geneva wants. Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded researchers that "they are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they've done and really scrutinize it in great detail, and ideally for someone elsewhere in the world to repeat the measurements." Only two labs elsewhere in the world can try to replicate the work: Fermilab and a Japanese installation that has been slowed by the tsunami and earthquake. And Fermilab's measuring systems aren't nearly as precise as the Europeans' and won't be upgraded for a while, said Fermilab scientist Rob Plunkett. Drew Baden, chairman of the physics department at the University of Maryland, said it is far more likely that the CERN findings are the result of measurement errors or some kind of fluke. Tracking neutrinos is very difficult, he said. "This is ridiculous what they're putting out," Baden said. "Until this is verified by another group, it's flying carpets. It's cool, but ..." So if the neutrinos are pulling this fast one on Einstein, how can it happen? Parke said there could be a cosmic shortcut through another dimension —physics theory is full of unseen dimensions —that allows the neutrinos to beat the speed of light. Indiana's Kostelecky theorizes that there are situations when the background is different in the universe, not perfectly symmetrical as Einstein says. Those changes in background may alter both the speed of light and the speed of neutrinos. But that doesn't mean Einstein's theory is ready for the trash heap, he said. "I don't think you're going to ever kill Einstein's theory. You can't. It works," Kostelecky said. There are just times when an additional explanation is needed, he said. If the European findings are correct, "this would change the idea of how the universe is put together," Columbia's Greene said. But he added: "I would bet just about everything I hold dear that this won't hold up to scrutiny.

[·WídgêT·]

 

[BFM_Crimson]

Needs paragraphs!

[jim360]

Heard about this story - it's almost certainly a systematic error or something that they've missed, I think the researchers would tend to agree with that. Still, it would almost be more interesting to find what exactly it is that they've missed than for it to turn out that this isn't a fluke.

[Tanxs1]

Sorry to be a nub... but can somebody summarize that huge paragraph for me?

 

[BFM_DarkFyr]

Sorry to be a nub... but can somebody summarize that huge paragraph for me?

 

Apparent discovery of faster-than-light particles met with large skepticism.

[jim360]

It's not easy to explain, really. The point is that there is a well-defined limit as to how little time it can take to get from A to B, but something seems to have broken that limit very slightly. More likely than not there is a way to explain this limit away as something called "systematic error" which basically means that the experiment isn't perfect. But there's just a chance that this is a real result and in fact the laws of physics as we know them aren't quite right yet.

[BFM_DarkFyr]

If systematic error was ruled out, the implications would be enormous! The chance that there has been an error in measurement is high, given the particles involved. I would be extremely interested but not entirely suprised if it was found that the relationship between space and time was not proportional.

Given our level of understanding of the universe, although it may seem high, could well be wrong in some areas which we have taken for granted and have applied to other areas of understanding; which is why the implications if this is true would be enormous. Alas, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one, and this is probably just an error, which isn't suprising at all (unless they were dealing with the most sophisticated measuring device made so far). There is always the possibility that something is wrong, but nothing is perfect.

I think of it this way; we have only been studying the fundamental laws of nature for only a few centuries, and, only recently, in-depth with extremely accurate tools. Genuine scientific progress is a slow climb, but when something big does come around, it vastly changes our understanding of nature. Look at black holes and wave-particle duality of light! These two are huge discoveries, and are now pretty much concreted into the physics and quantum physics world. Some accepted doctrines in science are too consistent to ever be considered possibly wrong, but yet there are some that could be wrong, and until a better explanation appears, it will be the 'accepted' doctrine, and that's the scientific method.

Well, it's 3AM. I'm off to a world of teleportation and wormholes, bye!

[BFM_Edison]

Technically, the math of relativity doesn't forbid it from going faster than the speed of light, just at it Plan on checking the paper out later today.

[BFM_SüprM@ñ]

It most likely is an error in measurement. Technology, just like humans, is not perfect and malfunction all the time. However, if it was true, my only reasonable explanation would be that the enourmous amoumt of energy used to accelerate the neutrino might've caused a wormhole that allowed the particle to arrive at it's destination earlier than it was suppose to. Of course that's just the guess of some guy that has very limited knowledge of physics in general, much less particle physics. And sorry about the lack of structure, made that post on my phone.

[BFM_Fénix]

"You shall affect what you measure"

[BFM_Edison]

By the way, mathematically his theory just says things with mass can't go at the speed of light. They can go faster as long as they have imaginary mass ;o

[Tanxs1]

AWESOME PIC :O

[MrMxyzptlk]

Oh no, be sure that this really happens, and it happens a LOT and in many other ways as well....


Your "rules" are more like "guidelines," really. (Credit: Pirates of the Caribbean)


We deal with this sort of thing all the time in the 5th Dimension....


It's how we make "Cosmic Swiss Cheese."


[ Actually, after having read many musings on things like The Holographic Universe you begin to realize just how short-sighted our "rules" regarding our physical surrounding may be.... ]

[BFM_ImaybeU]

There are so few absolutes in our existence, you can count them on one hand and have fingers left over.   Not "that" long ago in the human timeline , one global absolute that held for several millennia was that the world is flat.  The postulation than it was not flat caused considerable debate and consternation among those who had a vested interest in it being flat.

Galileo also caused quite a stir, upsetting some long held beliefs in his day.  I think he was only recently forgiven by the Vatican for his heresy on planetary motion.

This is exciting.