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Faster than lightspeed achieved?


toastywombel

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Can somebody please tell me what's going on with the faster than light neutrino? For such a big claim, you'd think it would be in the news more...

(moved this post into existing thread)

 

You must be reading different news sources than I. It's been all over the science blogs I read, and it's hard not to trip over the people claiming to know what basic error the scientists made.

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(moved this post into existing thread)

 

You must be reading different news sources than I. It's been all over the science blogs I read, and it's hard not to trip over the people claiming to know what basic error the scientists made.

For sure, it is all over science blogs, but other sites such as google news and drudge report haven't linked to anything related for quite a while.

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(moved this post into existing thread)

 

...and it's hard not to trip over the people claiming to know what basic error the scientists made.

 

Sounds like great cover for a surreptitious kick. They'll never convict you if I am on the jury.

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News has a shelf-life. And … Drudge report?

Yes, but you would think that the occasional link would be posted with something related -- at least, if I was in control of those websites it would be.

 

What's wrong with Drudge? (other than that it isn't really a science site)

Edited by Brainteaserfan
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How long is the time-lag at the CERN to detect the signal?

 

time line ----------------|||||-----------------------------|||||--------------------------------------------------------------|||||-------------------||||--------------------->>>

 

event ------------neutrino leaving---------neutrino leaving recorded-----------------------------------------neutrino arriving-------neutrino arriving recorded

 

Is the time-lag very short?

 

If CERN's time-lag is short than before, real neutrino arriving time may be shorter than announced data.

Because OPERA's measured time has a time-lag too.

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I still don't get it.... according to your argument, it is old, so it isn't news, so why would a science blog write about it? My point is if people don't get bored reading old news on blogs, why do they get tired of it on news websites?

 

Science blogs generally aren't selling news, or at least sensationalism, which is what currently passes for news.

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If and when the result is confirmed - when other experimenters have replicated the results; will this not be seen as a "perihelion of mercury" sort of moment?

It's been a while since these seemingly anomalous results of the Opera experiment have been announced. It's gratifying - and a natural response - that conducting this experiment in a slightly different way to possibly eliminate systematic errors has been proposed by the original research team, and that other research teams have indicated their intention to try to replicate the observed original anomaly. This is how science works.

 

If the original results are verified, it would be more accurate to describe this "moment" as similar to that resulting from the work of the High-Z Supernova Research Team and the (independent) Supernova Cosmology Project around 1998. It was originally thought that these two teams would be able to quantify the rate at which the expansion of the universe is slowing down over time. Instead, both teams found that the expansion of the universe has been accelerating for about the last six billion years.

 

Since neutrinos are generally considered to have some very tiny mass (due to observed oscillations in type), I suspect that the Opera researchers expected to see a neutrino time-of-travel slightly less than that of light. Their results certainly warrant careful scrutiny and replication by other research groups. It's possible that there is, in fact, an error in their experiment or their analysis.

 

It's also possible that their results are valid. This doesn't destroy Special or General relativity theory. It would, however, open up the possibility of new physics - just as the observation of an accelerating cosmic expansion has done.

 

If FTL neutrinos are found to be real, I wouldn't consider this finding to be a failure of any scientific theory, but rather a triumph of the scientific method.

 

Chris

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It's been a while since these seemingly anomalous results of the Opera experiment have been announced. It's gratifying - and a natural response - that conducting this experiment in a slightly different way to possibly eliminate systematic errors has been proposed by the original research team, and that other research teams have indicated their intention to try to replicate the observed original anomaly. This is how science works.

 

If the original results are verified, it would be more accurate to describe this "moment" as similar to that resulting from the work of the High-Z Supernova Research Team and the (independent) Supernova Cosmology Project around 1998. It was originally thought that these two teams would be able to quantify the rate at which the expansion of the universe is slowing down over time. Instead, both teams found that the expansion of the universe has been accelerating for about the last six billion years.

different flavours - similar but not entirely the same. the accelerated expansion was the sign of something new - this could be the first sign we have ever had that speed of light being max is flawed, and anything with that as axiom needs to be thought of in new light. ftl was forbidden if we wanted causality and SR - so something needs to change if ftl is a reality (although it probably isnt)

 

Since neutrinos are generally considered to have some very tiny mass (due to observed oscillations in type), I suspect that the Opera researchers expected to see a neutrino time-of-travel slightly less than that of light. Their results certainly warrant careful scrutiny and replication by other research groups. It's possible that there is, in fact, an error in their experiment or their analysis.

Not sure I understand this - I don't think there were any mainstream theories that have anything massless or massive (even very small mass) travelling faster than light. If they were looking to measure speed of neutrinos and show they were superluminal, they would have chosen a longer test, better design (per the new experiments that Tom mentioned above), and if they are shown to have misled their funders (who believed they were researching the oscillations between different flavours)

 

It's also possible that their results are valid. This doesn't destroy Special or General relativity theory. It would, however, open up the possibility of new physics - just as the observation of an accelerating cosmic expansion has done.

 

If FTL neutrinos are found to be real, I wouldn't consider this finding to be a failure of any scientific theory, but rather a triumph of the scientific method.

 

Chris

 

As i have said above - it is both a huge thing and also mindnumbingly unimportant. Einstein's theories of relativity work and have been tested exhaustively so far at virtually every level - for what we use them for now, we will continue to use them; they have not stopped providing correct results and accurate predictions. However there is that first sign (iff the results are shown to be correct) that ftl travel is possible and that would show that relativity is applicable in a limited (albeit vast) scenario and that another bigger, more universal theory is in the background.

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csmyth3025, on 3 November 2011 - 09:04 AM, said:

 

...If the original results are verified, it would be more accurate to describe this "moment" as similar to that resulting from the work of the High-Z Supernova Research Team and the (independent) Supernova Cosmology Project around 1998...

 

different flavours - similar but not entirely the same. the accelerated expansion was the sign of something new - this could be the first sign we have ever had that speed of light being max is flawed, and anything with that as axiom needs to be thought of in new light. ftl was forbidden if we wanted causality and SR - so something needs to change if ftl is a reality (although it probably isn't)

 

...Since neutrinos are generally considered to have some very tiny mass (due to observed oscillations in type), I suspect that the Opera researchers expected to see a neutrino time-of-travel slightly less [more] than that of light...

 

Not sure I understand this - I don't think there were any mainstream theories that have anything massless or massive (even very small mass) traveling faster than light. If they were looking to measure speed of neutrinos and show they were superluminal, they would have chosen a longer test, better design (per the new experiments that Tom mentioned above), and if they are shown to have misled their funders (who believed they were researching the oscillations between different flavours)

 

 

It's also possible that their results are valid. This doesn't destroy Special or General relativity theory. It would, however, open up the possibility of new physics ...

 

As i have said above - it is both a huge thing and also mindnumbingly unimportant. Einstein's theories of relativity work and have been tested exhaustively so far at virtually every level - for what we use them for now, we will continue to use them; they have not stopped providing correct results and accurate predictions. However there is that first sign (iff the results are shown to be correct) that ftl travel is possible and that would show that relativity is applicable in a limited (albeit vast) scenario and that another bigger, more universal theory is in the background.

 

First, I have to apologize for not proof-reading my original post: I intended the second passage to read as corrected above (actually, I was thinking "...expected to see a neutrino speed slightly less than that of light..." when I started typing that sentence and somehow mentally transfigured "speed" into "time-of-travel" in the process). This is just an embarrassing example of my sloppy writing.

 

I generally agree with your reply. I think the inability to resolve quantum field theory with general relativity is already an indicator that a more comprehensive underlying theory is needed.

 

Although there are, indeed, no mainstream theories that propose FTL travel for massive particles, there have been a number of conjectures about the possible existence of (ftl) tachyons which have an imaginary component to their rest mass. I'm open to the possibility that Opera may have uncovered an unexpected real result. If this is actually the case then we can look forward to some new (or renewed) thinking about tachyons.

 

Chris

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  • 2 weeks later...

I won't be directly involved and unfortunately I doubt we will get advance notice of result that we'd be permitted to share. But I can describe what they plan to do, since AFAIK the talk I saw is not any kind of secret.

 

They will use a series of much shorter pulses and they have a neutrino detector at both ends of the experiment, so they are not just trying to fit the leading and trailing edges of the pulses and compare them to the pulse of particles that created the neutrinos (which is what I think OPERA did). MINOS will use a large number of narrow pulses spaced at 19 ns and the target distance is almost the same, so they should be able to confirm or exclude the 60 ns value. If they can drop it down to the same 19 ns window, that's within the error bars of zero.

 

The OPERA data the speaker showed pointed out the scale of the problem — the pulses are at least 10000 ns wide, and the leading and trailing edge are around 1000

OPERA has now used this strategy to replicate their results:

 

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/11/neutrino_experiment_affirms_fa.html

 

They've used 3ns pulses to generate much shorter bursts, and have replicated the 60 nanosecond early arrival time for the neutrinos.

 

Of course, this doesn't rule out problems with their timing equipment, so we'll have to wait for MINOS on that.

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OPERA has now used this strategy to replicate their results:

 

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/11/neutrino_experiment_affirms_fa.html

 

They've used 3ns pulses to generate much shorter bursts, and have replicated the 60 nanosecond early arrival time for the neutrinos.

 

Of course, this doesn't rule out problems with their timing equipment, so we'll have to wait for MINOS on that.

 

MINOS also detects neutrino events at both ends of the run, which is important in case there's a systematic error in OPERA's proton detection scheme.

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At the supernova explosion, is the light speed the same as light speed C?

 

We know light can not escape from the black hole. why? Very big gravity blocks the light up to escape from there.

 

How about the gravity at the supernova explosion?

 

Is the gravity a negative state, i.e., minus gravity?

If so, the light speed is faster than normal light speed C near the supernova.

 

This means that the supernova 1987a had a small time difference between the light arriving and the neutrino arriving.

Edited by alpha2cen
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alpha2 - light travels at lightspeed in the vacuum. It might travel in curved lines / geodesics when mass/energy causes spacetime curvature - but in the vacuum it always does the same speed. If all neutrinos travel a bit faster than light then the neutrinos from the Supernova should have been here much earlier - it is a quandary. There is not a simple explanation at the moment - well apart from the explanation that say that OPERA/Gran Sasso has a systematic timing error

 

Is it a coincidence that the run between CERN and Gran Sasso is almost exactly the same distance as between FermiLab and MINOS - or is there something special about ~730km?

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alpha2 - light travels at lightspeed in the vacuum. It might travel in curved lines / geodesics when mass/energy causes spacetime curvature - but in the vacuum it always does the same speed.

 

Is the light speed faster than normal C near the supernova explosion area?

I mean negative time-space curvature.

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Is the light speed faster than normal C near the supernova explosion area?

I mean negative time-space curvature.

I don't know what this means really. And whether a supernova should cause such weird changes to spacetime curvature is beyond me.
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The scientists aren't claiming to have toppled relativity and are calling for independent confirmation. Just as one would expect of responsible physicists.

 

 

 

 

The scientists aren't claiming to have toppled relativity and are calling for independent confirmation. Just as one would expect of responsible physicists.

 

The 1st test with neutrino that exceeded speed of light was made in September at CERN, but everybody was skeptical, now we had the second confirmation that is convincing the mainstream physic and shaking the Relativity Theory fundamentally. This article also relieve another reality regarding Relativistic invariance and Lorentz Symmetry which are claimed to be inconsistence. People so far been skeptical but nobody so far claimed that it would be wrong either. It is maybe the time to reevaluate the counterarguments.

Edited by swansont
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Moderator Note

Advertising speculative science in mainstream threads is against the rules. URL deleted.




The 1st test with neutrino that exceeded speed of light was made in September at CERN, but everybody was skeptical, now we had the second confirmation that is convincing the mainstream physic and shaking the Relativity Theory fundamentally. This article also relieve another reality regarding Relativistic invariance and Lorentz Symmetry which are claimed to be inconsistence. People so far been skeptical but nobody so far claimed that it would be wrong either. It is maybe the time to reevaluate the counterarguments.


The latest test removed ONE of the concerns, not all of them. As someone mentioned recently (perhaps in another thread), other labs using an independent setup have to confirm this. If e.g. MINOS doesn't get the same number, that's going to be a strong indication that it's a systematic error.


Is it a coincidence that the run between CERN and Gran Sasso is almost exactly the same distance as between FermiLab and MINOS - or is there something special about ~730km?


At the MINOS colloquium I attended, IIRC it was implied that this was a coincidence. (the no connection kind, not the physics kind)
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