http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_BREAKING_LIGHT_SPEED?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

exciting!

also poley talk to me bout dis

I'm no scientist (no really!) but it's incredibly important to note that there IS a chance this was the result of an error. CERN is having a conference tomorrow where they will announce the findings.

If it IS true though, that's going to be nuts.

Heres another good article about it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484

Probably an error.

As I said earlier, if this proves true then it really ****s up the plot of Star Trek IV.

im having a panic attack as a physics major


what if i have to retake relativity

True or not, I have to admit the news really spiked my physics interest this evening and encouraged some good reading.

Brings this to mind.

Honestly I want it to be true if for nothing else than the huge uproar it'll have in the scientific community. It's not every day that such foundational theories and laws are shaken.

Interesting. I haven't looked at how the experiment was done but what are they using as the control? Light through the same aperatus? c is the speed of light in a vacuum Light does change speeds in the atmosphere and as far as I remember can be affected by gravity. Is it possible the interraction between nutrinos and the atmosphere/gravity are different to light?

A very interesting discovery though!

Came to post something VERY similar to FGR.

I'd be very surprised if they hadn't already taken that into account.

What is this?

They're the neutrinos from Galaxy High.

DUH.

Obviously someone has never been to Dimension X.

No I've listened to DMX

hhmm...basically sums up my thoughts on this at the moment

the webcast from CERN has just finished and I'm still digesting it.

for those interested, the paper on it is http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897

these guys have come out and said to the community that they really don't understand it, they aren't claiming Einstein is wrong. What they are trying to do at the moment is get as many people looking at the data/results as possible because within their team, they can't find anything wrong.

what is curious at the moment from my point of view is similar measurements from other neutrino baseline experiments haven't found anything, but these experiments have been using neutrinos at different energies and baselines, what is special about this one is the high amount of statistics coming out.

I would keep your eyes on this result though, one thing that came up in the questions after the talk was accuracy of the baseline length measurement, they are using the german and swiss meteorological agencies to verfiy the distance (via gps) against each other, both of these teams use the same equipment. You really need two different measurements from two different teams using two different types of equipment, not saying it's wrong, but it's one thing they want to look at. (they guy asking the question also suggested drilling a damn tunnel, no one disagreed, this result is that important)

Wasn't the length of the test like 700 miles? Would they really need a tunnel that long? That'd be insane.

Given the speed that light travels I'd say yes.

Friend14, what do you think?

Well that'd depend on their detector quality. If they had more accurate detectors they could possibly cut that distance down. Besides, I don't even want to pretend to guess exactly the science involved for determining that.

I figured Poley might get a kick out of this.

From what I recall the distance is required to even start noticing what might be relativistic effects.

Now if thats related I HAVE NO IDEA, but it sounds right to me.

It seems like it'd be cooler to just build stuff on the moon and fire upwards for testing instead of a tunnel.

WOAH WRONG THREAD.

This is cool news by the way. I don't think that it necessarily has to be a mistake.

ahem.

Doesn't GPS incorporate relativity in generating measurements? And this experiment is possibly disproving relativity? If so, Einstein must have at least come up with a decent (maybe incomplete) model of how things work.

I was going to suggest doing it in space until I remembered that they're doing it underground to avoid crap from the sun/etc. So I think space would be bad. :/

I doubt there's any tunnel. Neutrinos barely interact at all with matter (and thus are difficult to detect) and so presumably they just fired the neutrino(s) straight through the earth.

The news article I read mentioned an accuracy of 10 nanoseconds but no mention of how accurately they measured the distance. I initially figured they needed an accurate distance down maybe as low as centimetres and that this'll just turn out to be a distance error. But I just worked it out roughly and they need to be accurate down to about the nearest 15m in order to claim a speed faster than light and that sounds like a lot harder an error to make!

The other thing I'd like to know is since they presumably fired multiple neutrinos given the poor detection rate; how do they know which one they detected or are they capable of firing a sufficient quantity of neutrinos instantaneously?

"That's why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208"

It wouldn't matter. If it's a later neutrino, that means they were going even faster.

My bet is that it's some kind of tricky group velocity thing.

there is no tunnel btw, they are fired through the ground. Neutrino's are weakly interacting particles and travelling through the earth is like travelling through space for them, they will hardly interact at all.

the neutrinos are produced in bunches by producing Mesons from which they decay (pions or kions). The bunches are produced in a very similar way to the LHC bunches, in fact they come from the same initial accelerator, the SPS. Simply put, a bunch (~1x10^11 protons) of protons are fired into a target that will give off charged Mesons, Mesons of a certain energy are collected and focused with magnets into a decay tube. The decay length of these Mesons is well understood and so you will have a bunch of Mesons, all decaying in this tube and you can calculate the energy of the neutrino that will decay at a certain angle.

So the timing comes from the proton bunches, which is very well understood, the emitance of Mesons from the target is well understood as is their decay length and time. You won't know exactly how many neutrinos you are producing, but you will know at what time you are producing them and what type of neutrinos. This experiment wasn't built to measure the speed of neutrinos after all, it was built to measure neutrino oscillations, this measurement is a side project that put a spanner in the works.

They know these are neutrinos from the beam because of few features, firstly there is a bunch of them heading over so you'd get a splatter of hits over a certain time corresponding to the bunch size, secondly their energy is tuned to ~17 GeV and thirdly (and I'm assuming here) if the experiment is anything like other neutrino experiments they are pretty decent at being able to tell the general direction the neutrino was travelling. (all of this is in the paper I linked btw, I'm just giving the basic principles here, they go into detail on how they can measure the structure of the proton bunch at CERN and resolve a similar structure occuring in the neutrino signal at gran sasso.)

The accuracy of the beamline is measured to with 20cm, it is 731278.0, ± 0.2m

Thanks for the pic Yecti, loved it

The idea of the tunnel, this is totally nutty btw, (it won't happen unless they can't find anything wrong with the experiment), is so that they can fire a laser down the damn thing and get a more accurate measurement on the distance between the source and detector.

In regards to the distance, the 743km, again it has nothing to do with relativity, it is this distance because, a) CERN can produce a nice neutrino beam and b) it is a long enough distance for the neutrinos to start oscillating and be at one of the high mixing points (imagine a sine wave and choosing a distance where it's at its maxima) for the muon neutrinos to oscillate into electron neutrinos.

As far as I'm concerned, this experiment doesn't affect Einstein's formula for observing physics. For the most part, we still observe physics at the speed of light*. It doesn't matter at what speed the event is occurring. What this does highlight is the deficiency of the scientific community to be able to resolve Einstein's formula to classical mechanics. Until now, their explanation was that "Observation is Reality", which barred anything from being able to travel faster than light. If anything, this throws that conclusion into doubt, but not Einstein's formula. Baring in mind that Einstein's formula is only applicable for events that travel less than the speed of light.

*Relativistic calculations are primarily used in astrophysical observations. Typically this is limited by one observer (even multiple telescopes on Earth and in space are still basically pointing from the same observable point in space) and thus observation is limited by the time it takes for light to reach the observer from the event, regardless of how fast the event is traveling.

Like Poley said, they're not doing it in a tunnel now, they're just shooting straight through the Earth. The tunnel is for basically everything OTHER than the neutrinos themselves. But poley explained it better, naturally.

Ah alright, thank you for clarifying. IF they couldn't find something wrong and had to build the nutty tunnel, is 743km a required distance?

If it is, they should drill straight down. I don't care how impossible it'd be, do it anyway.

good idea mang

I hope you guys don't mind the necromancy, but this is just the best abstract ever:



http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1110/1110.2832.pdf

LOL at the abstract