Light barrier broken?

by | Sep 22, 2011 | Journal | 25 comments

Some new evidence.

25 Comments

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  1. P J Evans
    P J Evans on September 23, 2011 at 8:38 pm

    From what I was reading, the people at CERN had their distance measured to 20 cm, which is less than a nanosecond. They said they could have gotten the measurement closer, but they’d have had to close the entire highway tunnel, instead of just one lane, for a week.

    For a laugh, the caption on the photo with the story in the LA Times:
    http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-0923-speed-of-light-20110923,0,497738.story
    The globe of the CERN laboratory shines outside Geneva. A team of experimental physicists there says it has recorded neutrinos traveling 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. (Anja Niedringhaus, Associated Press / September 23, 2011)

    I commented that this is like saying you exceeded the speed limit by 10 minutes. (They got it right, several paragraphs down in the story.)

  2. herwin
    herwin on September 23, 2011 at 11:46 pm

    This is the *second* shoe. It’s well-established that the experimental data are consistent with an imaginary rest mass. The research community has been debating the case for tachyonic neutrinos since 1985. There’s an interesting implication–there’s a preferred frame of reference. Noted in passing: tachyons have to be electrically neutral to avoid Cherenkov radiation causing them to lose energy and accelerate to infinite speed. (If you can bleed off energy, you can accelerate them.)

    In any case, FTL is the elephant in the room.

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