Faster than light particles found, claim scientists

[harshad]

i personally dont think that a particle being just a tiny bit faster than light would change physics as we know it. maybe theoretical physics, but the physics we use in engineering wont change at all.

it can change since it changes the understanding of speed who knows how many elements are faster than light

 

[muse]

i personally dont think that a particle being just a tiny bit faster than light would change physics as we know it. maybe theoretical physics, but the physics we use in engineering wont change at all.

fair point, after all, we still have use for Newtonian physics

 

[below_freezing]

it can change since it changes the understanding of speed who knows how many elements are faster than light

we already know that ordinary matter, that is to say atoms composed of neutrons, protons and electrons, cannot accelerate faster than light, and therefore assemblies of atoms like solids, liquids and gases also cannot. therefore its useless because for all intents and purposes nothing built by humans can ever travel faster than light.

a neutrino is, from what i read, a massless, chargeless particle that does not interact with ordinary matter much and is nearly indetectable; it is generated by obscure processes in nuclear reactions and it is essentially useless in engineering applications.

fair point, after all, we still have use for Newtonian physics

actually, Newtonian physics is the most commonly used physics by far. relativity has very obscure and niche applications. quantum mechanics is highly useful for electronics, advanced materials and telecommunications, but this isn't as much as Newtonian mechanics which can even be used as approximations for simulating chemical systems, whereas a quantum simulation of say... a rocket, would be useless.

 

[harshad]

we already know that ordinary matter, that is to say atoms composed of neutrons, protons and electrons, cannot accelerate faster than light, and therefore assemblies of atoms like solids, liquids and gases also cannot. therefore its useless because for all intents and purposes nothing built by humans can ever travel faster than light.

a neutrino is, from what i read, a massless, chargeless particle that does not interact with ordinary matter much and is nearly indetectable; it is generated by obscure processes in nuclear reactions and it is essentially useless in engineering applications.

the calculations in physics are based on the assumption that nothing is faster than speed of light,since there is something faster than light so the calculations might not be perfect

 

[below_freezing]

the calculations in physics are based on the assumption that nothing is faster than speed of light,since there is something faster than light so the calculations might not be perfect

Newtonian mechanics doesnt assume this but we still dont have cars flying faster than light do we?

 

[Safriz]

if you remember...einsteins e=mc2 was questioned years ago when scientists made similar claims about supernova...They said that supernova breifly released energy equal to the energy released bu the whole universe...that wasnt possible because the exploding stars of supernova didnt have thst much mass to release such large amount of energy....
only later the claims were proved wrong and the very high level lf gama ray bursts from very distant supernova were explained on the basis of gravitational lensing...
the lensing exaggerated and magnified the energy...

in this case the neutrino may be taking a detour and not completing the full course.....

but any theory can be proved wrong at any time.....relativity is no exception.

 

[President Camacho]

in this case the neutrino may be taking a detour and not completing the full course.....

but any theory can be proved wrong at any time.....relativity is no exception.

Ek dum sahi baat hai aapki, lekin ye bhi to sochiye, that it has been experimentally proved that any particle in motion attains mass converted from part of the energy used to accelerate it. Now that is the truth (at speed close to that of light, the protons at LHC had become 40,000 times more massive than normal). And per that, the neutrinos should have become black holes equaling the mass of infinite universes.

I think you are right about the neutrinos taking a detour. Something very similar to that had happened a few years ago when some scientists conducted an experiment and claimed that the particle reached the destination the moment it was released. Later they found some glitch in the process, which after correction showed the experiment held true to the laws of Relativity.

 

[Bombay Dude]

Here is the Official Research Paper released by CERN from which the claim was made.

http://static.arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897.pdf

 

[drunken-monke]

Till date Einstines theory of relativity holds the intactness and the results of this experiment are yet to be verified.

E= mc2

According to this theory nothing can travel faster than light. Hence if something is traveling faster than it, it means that the partica is heavier than universe and has infinite energy. This both thing seems to be absurd in practicality. But if we look by other angle; Nutrinos are massless and chargless. Thus how much energy can be required to give them that much momentum so that they travel faster than light??

And yes one of the forum member quoted rightly that theory of relativity standed tall and valid when they verified about lensed gamma ray burst...

 

[Twain Shakespeare]

Physicists urge caution over apparent speed of light violationScientists react with disbelief and call for repeat experiments after results suggest particles can travel faster than light



reddit this Comments (369)
Alok Jha and Ian Sample guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 September 2011 14.33 EDT Article history
Professor Brian Cox has said that if the Italian discovery is proved correct, it would require 'a complete rewriting of our understanding of the universe'. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Guardian
Scientists around the world reacted with shock yesterday to results from an Italian laboratory that seemed to show certain subatomic particles can travel faster than light. If true, the finding breaks one of the most fundamental laws of physics and raises bizarre possibilities including time travel and shortcuts via hidden extra dimensions.

Scientists at the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) experiment in Gran Sasso, Italy, found that neutrinos sent through the Earth to its detectors from Cern, 450 miles (730km) away in Geneva, arrived earlier than they should have. The journey would take a beam of light around 2.4 milliseconds to complete, but after running the Opera experiment for three years and timing the arrival of 15,000 neutrinos, the scientists have calculated the particles arrived at Gran Sasso 60 billionths of a second earlier, with an error margin of plus or minus 10 billionths of a second. The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 metres per second, so the neutrinos were apparently travelling at 299,798,454 metres per second.

A cornerstone of modern physics is the idea that nothing can travel faster than light does in a vacuum. At the turn of the 20th century Albert Einstein encapsulated this idea in his theory of special relativity, which proposes that the laws of physics are the same for all observers and led to the famous equation E=mc2, indicating that mass and energy are equivalent.

Brian Cox, a professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester, urged caution. "If you've got something travelling faster than light, then it's the most profound discovery of the last 100 years or more in physics. It's a very, very big deal," he said on BBC 6 Music on Friday. "It requires a complete rewriting of our understanding of the universe."

Professor Jim Al-Khalili at the University of Surrey said it was most likely that something was skewing the results. "If the neutrinos have broken the speed of light, it would overturn a keystone theory from the last century of physics. That's possible, but it's far more likely that there is an error in the data. So let me put my money where my mouth is: if the Cern experiment proves to be correct and neutrinos have broken the speed of light, I will eat my boxer shorts on live TV."

Opera co-ordinator Antonio Ereditato said his team was "recovering from the shock" of the discovery and would leave the physics community to explain the result. "We made a measurement and we believe our measurement is sound," he said. "Now it is up to the community to scrutinise it. We are not in a hurry. We are saying, tell us what we did wrong, redo the measurement if you can." He added: "There will be all sorts of science fiction writers who will give their own opinions on what this means, but we don't want to enter that game."

If the measurements are shown to be correct, physicists will have to modify their understanding of special relativity. There are several theories that could help explain the results.

Heinrich Paes at Dortmund University and colleagues believe it might be possible for neutrinos to move through hidden extra dimensions of space and effectively take shortcuts through space-time.

"The extra dimension is warped in a way that particles moving through it can travel faster than particles that go through the known three dimensions of space. It's like a shortcut through this extra dimension. So it looks like particles are going faster than light, but actually they don't."

Another potential explanation for the observation was given by Alan Kostelecky at Indiana University. He proposed in 1985 that an energy field that lies unseen in the vacuum could allow neutrinos to move faster through space than photons, the particles that make up light.

"This is a field that sits in the vacuum and as a result, things travelling in the vacuum will have unconventional properties," he said. "It may very well be that neutrinos travel faster than light does in that medium. It is not at all unreasonable that that would be the case."

Professor Dave Wark, leader of the UK group on the T2K neutrino experiment in Japan, cautioned that scientists would "require a very high standard of proof and confirmation from other neutrino experiments around the world".

Susan Cartwright, senior lecturer in particle astrophysics at Sheffield University, said there were many potential sources of error in the Opera experiment. "The sort of thing you might worry about is have they correctly accounted for the time delay of actually reading out the signals? Whatever you are using as a timing signal, that has to travel down the cables to your computer and when you are talking about nanoseconds, you have to know exactly how quickly the current travels, and it is not instantaneous."

Cartwright works on T2K, which sends neutrinos over a 295km distance. "We could certainly check this, but MINOS [the neutrino experiment at Fermilab in the US] are in a better position because we are still doing repairs after the earthquake that struck Japan."

Professor Jenny Thomas of University College London, a spokesperson for the MINOS neutrino experiment, said if the discovery was proved correct, it "would overturn everything we thought we understood about relativity and the speed of light".

Ereditato said the Opera team was going through a mix of feelings. "There is excitement, adrenaline, because you feel you have hit something hot. Another feeling is exhaustion. A third feeling is let's look again and again and think of other checks we have not yet done."



Physicists urge caution over apparent speed of light violation | Science | The Guardian

 

[Thomas]

I have always loved watching Dr. Michio Kaku who is a co-author of superstring theory. Check out this video where he talks about it may be possible to travel faster then light.

 

[below_freezing]

Physicists urge caution over apparent speed of light violationScientists react with disbelief and call for repeat experiments after results suggest particles can travel faster than light



reddit this Comments (369)
Alok Jha and Ian Sample guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 September 2011 14.33 EDT Article history
Professor Brian Cox has said that if the Italian discovery is proved correct, it would require 'a complete rewriting of our understanding of the universe'. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Guardian
Scientists around the world reacted with shock yesterday to results from an Italian laboratory that seemed to show certain subatomic particles can travel faster than light. If true, the finding breaks one of the most fundamental laws of physics and raises bizarre possibilities including time travel and shortcuts via hidden extra dimensions.

Scientists at the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) experiment in Gran Sasso, Italy, found that neutrinos sent through the Earth to its detectors from Cern, 450 miles (730km) away in Geneva, arrived earlier than they should have. The journey would take a beam of light around 2.4 milliseconds to complete, but after running the Opera experiment for three years and timing the arrival of 15,000 neutrinos, the scientists have calculated the particles arrived at Gran Sasso 60 billionths of a second earlier, with an error margin of plus or minus 10 billionths of a second. The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 metres per second, so the neutrinos were apparently travelling at 299,798,454 metres per second.

A cornerstone of modern physics is the idea that nothing can travel faster than light does in a vacuum. At the turn of the 20th century Albert Einstein encapsulated this idea in his theory of special relativity, which proposes that the laws of physics are the same for all observers and led to the famous equation E=mc2, indicating that mass and energy are equivalent.

Brian Cox, a professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester, urged caution. "If you've got something travelling faster than light, then it's the most profound discovery of the last 100 years or more in physics. It's a very, very big deal," he said on BBC 6 Music on Friday. "It requires a complete rewriting of our understanding of the universe."

Professor Jim Al-Khalili at the University of Surrey said it was most likely that something was skewing the results. "If the neutrinos have broken the speed of light, it would overturn a keystone theory from the last century of physics. That's possible, but it's far more likely that there is an error in the data. So let me put my money where my mouth is: if the Cern experiment proves to be correct and neutrinos have broken the speed of light, I will eat my boxer shorts on live TV."

Opera co-ordinator Antonio Ereditato said his team was "recovering from the shock" of the discovery and would leave the physics community to explain the result. "We made a measurement and we believe our measurement is sound," he said. "Now it is up to the community to scrutinise it. We are not in a hurry. We are saying, tell us what we did wrong, redo the measurement if you can." He added: "There will be all sorts of science fiction writers who will give their own opinions on what this means, but we don't want to enter that game."

If the measurements are shown to be correct, physicists will have to modify their understanding of special relativity. There are several theories that could help explain the results.

Heinrich Paes at Dortmund University and colleagues believe it might be possible for neutrinos to move through hidden extra dimensions of space and effectively take shortcuts through space-time.

"The extra dimension is warped in a way that particles moving through it can travel faster than particles that go through the known three dimensions of space. It's like a shortcut through this extra dimension. So it looks like particles are going faster than light, but actually they don't."

Another potential explanation for the observation was given by Alan Kostelecky at Indiana University. He proposed in 1985 that an energy field that lies unseen in the vacuum could allow neutrinos to move faster through space than photons, the particles that make up light.

"This is a field that sits in the vacuum and as a result, things travelling in the vacuum will have unconventional properties," he said. "It may very well be that neutrinos travel faster than light does in that medium. It is not at all unreasonable that that would be the case."

Professor Dave Wark, leader of the UK group on the T2K neutrino experiment in Japan, cautioned that scientists would "require a very high standard of proof and confirmation from other neutrino experiments around the world".

Susan Cartwright, senior lecturer in particle astrophysics at Sheffield University, said there were many potential sources of error in the Opera experiment. "The sort of thing you might worry about is have they correctly accounted for the time delay of actually reading out the signals? Whatever you are using as a timing signal, that has to travel down the cables to your computer and when you are talking about nanoseconds, you have to know exactly how quickly the current travels, and it is not instantaneous."

Cartwright works on T2K, which sends neutrinos over a 295km distance. "We could certainly check this, but MINOS [the neutrino experiment at Fermilab in the US] are in a better position because we are still doing repairs after the earthquake that struck Japan."

Professor Jenny Thomas of University College London, a spokesperson for the MINOS neutrino experiment, said if the discovery was proved correct, it "would overturn everything we thought we understood about relativity and the speed of light".

Ereditato said the Opera team was going through a mix of feelings. "There is excitement, adrenaline, because you feel you have hit something hot. Another feeling is exhaustion. A third feeling is let's look again and again and think of other checks we have not yet done."



Physicists urge caution over apparent speed of light violation | Science | The Guardian

wait.

the Neutrinos were not traveling faster than light in a vacuum.

the neutrinos were traveling faster than light in a solid medium: the rock of the earth.

optical properties change significantly in solid state media and there is no reason why neutrino propagation should also not.

 

[Tractor]

Why must say something travel faster or slower than light?What is light?Is it something make people to see the world?

 

[rohitshubham]

Why must say something travel faster or slower than light?What is light?Is it something make people to see the world?

Please dont tell me that a person doesn't know what light is .......

 

[Tractor]

Please dont tell me that a person doesn't know what light is .......

hehe,I am not god,I really don't know what light means and look like,just know brightness and darkness in appearance.