Neutrinos still faster than light in latest version of experiment

[bananas]

Source: The Guardian

The scientists who appeared to have found in September that certain subatomic particles can travel faster than light have ruled out one potential source of error in their measurements after completing a second, fine-tuned version of their experiment.

Their results, posted on the ArXiv preprint server on Friday morning and submitted for peer review in the Journal of High Energy Physics, confirmed earlier measurements that neutrinos, sent through the ground from Cern near Geneva to the Gran Sasso lab in Italy 450 miles (720km) away seemed to travel faster than light.

<snip>

One potential source of error pointed out by other scientists was that the pulses of neutrinos sent by Cern were relatively long, around 10 microseconds each, so measuring the exact arrival time of the particles at Gran Sasso could have relatively large errors. To account for this potential problem in the latest version of the test, the beams sent by Cern were thousands of times shorter – around three nanoseconds – with large gaps of 524 nanoseconds between them. This allowed scientists to time the arrival of the neutrinos at Gran Sasso with greater accuracy.

<snip>

In a statement released on Friday, Fernando Ferroni, president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, said: "A measurement so delicate and carrying a profound implication on physics requires an extraordinary level of scrutiny. The experiment Opera, thanks to a specially adapted Cern beam, has made an important test of consistency of its result. The positive outcome of the test makes us more confident in the result, although a final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world".

<snip>

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/nov/18/neutrinos-still-faster-than-light

---

CERN webcast starts on Friday at 4 pm Prague Winter Time (10 am New York Time).

Press release at http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2011/PR19.11E.html

Webcast at http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/

Journalists wishing to ask questions may do so via twitter using the hash tag #nuquestions, or via the usual CERN press office channels.

Via http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/11/opera-neutrinos-ftl-even-at-3-ns.html

[truthisfreedom]

1. That's uplifting. Science doesn't get a lot of publicity these days.

If experiment after experiment proves neutrinos are faster than light, we got something new to work with.

[Orrex]

2. I remember when this story first broke 12 days from now.

[DetlefK]

3. Do you remember the lottery results from back then?

[ooglymoogly]

31. Laughing out loud. nt

[Ichingcarpenter]

4. The experiment

The experiment, in which neutrino particles were/will be/are discovered to have travelled/will travel/ are travelling faster than the speed of light, will take place/has already taken place/is taking place right now at the Large Hadron Collider.

The initial – or possibly final - experiment produced, or has yet to produce, or is somehow still producing, results that scientists continue to find, are finding, or have yet to find shocking, even if they don’t know what the results are as the experiment may well not have taken place yet.

Discussing the findings, physicist Dr Carolyn Ryan said: “I thought I’d seen and was yet to see everything, but this quite literally blew, is blowing and will blow my mind.

“When the results first came in, two weeks from now, I was sceptical, but then I realised I’d seen them before, the previous week, and I’m also looking at them again now, for the first time, in utter astonishment

[WheelWalker]

33. DUzy

[dballance]

5. We Always learn Something New

There was a time when "science" said the sun revolved around the earth. There was a time when "science" said the world was flat.

We found out those assumptions were wrong.

I respect Einstein so much and his work is still epic. But he was a human like all the rest of us. He just might have been wrong about the assumption nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. I think no one would be more happy to say he was wrong and that there are particles that travel faster than light than Einstein. He was a true scientist and would have happily looked at experimental results and say - yep, I was wrong.

That's how we progress. We admit things are not as we thought they were and we adapt to the new reality and find a way to live with it.

That's why humans have been around for a while and get along okay.

Dave

[dballance]

6. Being Philosphical

I just wanted to post that being wrong is just as important and gratifying to a true scientist as being right.

Disproving your thesis will be painful. Trust me, I know it sucks to be wrong.

But it will be important to the scientific world. No matter the outcome of your experiments you add to the body of knowledge for everyone else. So you are never a failure.

[Aleric]

13. +1

So few people actually understand what science is these days.

[VWolf]

8. Reformulating relativity

to account for superluminal motion would likely take a colossal effort. There's just so much data supporting SR in its current form, and its derivation is elegant and based on only a couple very plausible assumptions (although that in itself does not qualify a scientific theory by any means).

Exciting to some, terrifying to others!

Call me skeptical, but I think these observations will eventually be shown to be in error.

[ooglymoogly]

51. sorry wrong place

[euphorb]

20. Actually this does not prove Einstein wrong

The theory of relativity does not prohibit a particle traveling faster than the speed of light. What it says is that a particle traveling slower than the speed of light cannot be accelerated beyond the speed of light. The theoretical groundwork for this was worked out in the 1960s, in which it was shown that particles that always travel faster than the speed of light are consistent with relativity. However, they cannot be slowed to a speed less than the speed of light. Such particles were even given a name -- tachyons. It was recognized at the time that there was no experimental evidence for such particles, but that they could exist, even for short times. They could be created in some interaction, travel for a short while at a speed greater than that of light, then be annihilated in another interaction. That is exactly what is happening in these current experiments.

[ooglymoogly]

52. Soooo...a whole new world beyond the speed of light....

and the one we know behind it...worlds beyond the worlds most powerful electron microscope.

What will the newest step in microscopy tell us if not faster and smaller particles within particles making the speed of light so obsolete as to contemplate trips to distant planets.

That speeds beyond the speed of light must begin and exist beyond the speed of light and gravity...to exist in worlds so small as to not be encumbered by the prison bars of time.

[AlbertCat]

26. There was a time when "science" said the sun revolved around the earth.

It's good that you put "science" in quotation marks, because real "science" never said such a thing.

[Gore1FL]

43. Are you saying Ptolemy was not a scientist?

He said exactly that based on hypothesis and observation.

He was later proven to be wrong, but to argue it wasn't science is not valid.

[Gore1FL]

42. Relativity could be true still in 3 dimensions

This could point to traveling through another dimension as one possibility.

There is more than right or wrong. There is a "right but there is more." Gravity is like that. Newtonian Physics is far from perfect, but it got us to the moon.

[SpiralHawk]

7. The Los Alamos Neutrino Detector

Situated on the flank of a firey Super Volcano in the Land of Enchantment

http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/618/enlarge

[malthaussen]

9. There's a hell of a universe next door...

wanna go?

-- Mal

[randome]

11. Is that from 'Planetary'?

If not, should have been.

[Remmah2]

12. A neutrino walks into a bar.

Bartender says, "No charge for you."

[ooglymoogly]

36. Bartender says...no charge for you...whats Dancing Foot going to do in the fourth?

[Warren DeMontague]

47. You are George Dorn. nt

[Phoonzang]

10. Ha...eat it "Laws" of Physics!!! nt

[ieoeja]

14. Neutrinos engaging in an act of Civil Disobedience. They are the 99%. n/t

[stlsaxman]

16. #OST- OCCUPY SPACE/TIME

[Roland99]

25. heh

[ooglymoogly]

40. Ha! The establishment cops will soon be beating them down with baseball bats

pepper spray, rubber bullets and tear gas....if they can catch them.

[stlsaxman]

15. Scientist "inside joke"-

[ragemage]

17. Very cool...

Warp speed someday? We can always dream.

[Javaman]

18. This is just so cool!

This has such incredible implication.

[Alhena]

19. Wake me when they reach Ludicrous Speed

[qb]

21. So at this velocity will the neutrinos start heating the earth's core like a microwave?

:scared:

:rofl:

[AlbertCat]

27. WE WERE WARNED

Nobody warned me how BAD that movie was!!!!:grr:

[Warren DeMontague]

22. which doesn't explain why the neutrinos from Supernova 1987A didn't arrive in, say, 1984.

I'm inclined to think that IF this is not some easily overlooked glitch with the measurement, experiment, etc. the most interesting explanation I've heard is that it may be evidence of 'shortcutting' across Kaluza-Klein dimensions over short distances (i.e. less than the diameter of the Earth) which would provide some long sought-after evidentiary basis for which to further validate or not validate string theory.

It's fascinating, and like other posters have said, it's nice to see science working the way it should. These claims should be re-checked, and GOOD scientists want their data to be verified or invalidated, because what they're after isn't so much being 'right', it's the truth.

Thankfully, though, the "see? this proves evolution wrong!!!!!!!" :crazy: crowd hasn't shown up to this thread, yet.

[tinrobot]

46. Exacty, which is why I'm waiting for another team to replicate the results.

[tinrobot]

23. Not so fast...

They basically just ran the same experiment over again using the same methods. In other words, they used the same ruler to measure it, only more precisely. We still don't know if the method they used is measuring faster than light travel or if it is simply an inaccurate measurement.

In order to truly confirm this, they need to do a second experiment using different methods that creates the same results.

edit : Clarity.

[stlsaxman]

28. read it again- that is exactly what they did.

"In order to truly confirm this, they need to do a second experiment using different methods that creates the same results."


In their original experiment scientists fired beams of neutrinos from Cern to the Gran Sasso lab and the neutrinos seemed to arrive sixty billionths of a second earlier than they should if travelling at the speed of light in a vacuum.

One potential source of error pointed out by other scientists was that the pulses of neutrinos sent by Cern were relatively long, around 10 microseconds each, so measuring the exact arrival time of the particles at Gran Sasso could have relatively large errors. To account for this potential problem in the latest version of the test, the beams sent by Cern were thousands of times shorter – around three nanoseconds – with large gaps of 524 nanoseconds between them. This allowed scientists to time the arrival of the neutrinos at Gran Sasso with greater accuracy.


There's "Clarity" for ya...

[qazplm]

32. the question though

is did the solve the potential time dilation issue with the clocks?

[tinrobot]

45. Actually, it's the same experiment, better measurements

They used the same techniques but with better accuracy. By shortening the pulses, it's basically like using the same ruler, but only with finer gradations on the ruler. We still don't know if the ruler they are using is completely accurate. In order to truly verify this, they need to test it against a different ruler (i.e. a different experiment/technique)

[stlsaxman]

48. okay, i'll bite- how else would one measure the timing of neutrinos?

:shrug:

[tinrobot]

49. In a Nobel-prize winning way?

Quite honestly, I have no idea.

[stlsaxman]

54. okay then- guess you best leave it to those that do.

hey- i don't know how to make a time machine but if i drink enough beer and eat a sack of White Castles i can shit what looks a whole lot like apple butter!

on edit: sorry for the snark but i thought it was funny. no offense meant.

[stlsaxman]

55. If these guys don't get a Nobel for this... i mean- they just HAVE to!

it's like they're trying to get it to fail... and they can't! they can't disprove their findings.

[Roland99]

24. Guess Brian Greene will have to have a new show on NOVA to discuss this

:)

[ooglymoogly]

29. earth shaking discovery...good on Cern and the teams of scientists involved.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

37. So . . . CERN creates earthquakes when operating?

Causality has taken a huge hit today.

Now, the physicks whirled will be out in force, trying to find ANOTHER possible error in CERN's findings and experiment. If they don't, our whole understanding of physics will be very similar to what happened at the end of the last century, when man stubbornly believed that all classical physics questions were answered, or soon would be. Then some damned patent clerk screwed everything up, with Goedel's seasoning on top.

[ooglymoogly]

38. Patent clerks have the unsung genius at their fingertips.

Particularly when they too happen to be genius's, able to see, at a glance, the one flaw in the formula that will change history.

This discovery and proof is seismic.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

50. Dunno about others, I find this news incredibly exciting

The possibilities are mind-bending. If the speed of light limit can be "avoided" then space travel and communications can take on a whole new . . . eh, dimension.

[ooglymoogly]

53. We are breaking our of the prison bars of time.

Watch out future, you have long overplayed your hand.

[ooglymoogly]

58. Correction: Thats out of...not our of. our of makes no sense. nt

[certainot]

30. its always great when someone breaks the certitude barrier

[donquijoterocket]

34. that

As near as I can tell is what science exists to do.Everyone needs shaken out of their comfort zone from time to time. This needs good science reporters to spread it as widely as possible if,for no other reason than to illustrate how real science works.

[ooglymoogly]

44. That certitude barrier has made certifiable, great men of

science long later proved right. Too late to save them from destruction.

[Uncle Joe]

35. Kicked and recommended, date 11/20/11

Thanks for the thread, bananas.

[MicaelS]

39. Reminds of that poem....

There Was A Young Lady Named Bright

By Anonymous

There was a young lady named Bright,
whose speed was much faster than light.
She set off one day
in a relative way,
and returned on the previous night.

[ooglymoogly]

41. Perfect...nt

[redgiant]

56. How many points is that worth on DL? n/t

[redgiant]

57. Infinity + 1 n/t