Some new evidence.
Light barrier broken?
by CJ | Sep 22, 2011 | Journal | 25 comments
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http://www.krem.com/news/technology/130375543.html
This made the evening’s national news for a brief blip. It’ll have to wait until tomorrow, when hopefully my broadband and cable will be back up and running. Then I’ll get to check out the article.
The TV spot says a Swiss uni source has measured neutrinos which appear to be moving faster than light, and they are awaiting others’ independent confirmation of their findings. If this is true, very, very exciting for the astrophysicists and potentially great fun (and productive) for the science fiction writers. — I’d bet several people are extra eager to hear the results. I wonder what sort of bet Dr. Hawking has going on this one. 😀
Exciting, whether it pans out or not, and for all of two or three minutes, the whole country got a genuinely science fiction and science fact question, while sitting down to supper. How nice it would be if the next scientist, writer, or astronaut to solve the question heard that and had his or her imagination sparked…beyond the crummy economy and strife of the present day.
And…I hope Dr. Sagan got a smile, wherever his atoms are these days.
This reminds me of a short story I read years ago.. Some alien patrolmen(?) are wandering through our neck of the universe, when they come across a strange device. They look it up in their database and discover it is the remnant of an old physics experiment. It forces the speed of light to be a constant… “What a silly notion; what was that guy thinking of?” “Well, he’s dead now, we might as well turn it off.” “OK” ….
I guess that just happened…
Anybody know that story?
I just saw an article in my favourite online newspaper on this 2 secs before I looked in here – does that mean something? LOL!
anyway, yes, it’s rather exciting, isn’t it. one of the things that caught my eye in the article was this …Heinrich Paes, a physicist at Dortmund University, has developed another theory that could explain the result. The neutrinos may be taking a shortcut through space-time, by travelling from Cern to Gran Sasso through extra dimensions. “That can make it look like a particle has gone faster than the speed of light when it hasn’t,” he said.
hyperspace, anyone?
There are some funny recent results involving neutrinos. To start with, the oscillations, which implied mass. Then there’s evidence that the radioactive decay rate is proportional to the neutrino flux. This result implies neutrinos are tachyons (see Chodos, et al, 1985), with imaginary rest mass. It’s not totally surprising, but it does mean you can send information faster than light.
Here’s xkcd’s take on the story:
http://xkcd.com/955/
I think that in the next few years the whole Standard Model will have to be revised, and we will see some really new and interesting physics emerging.
P=NP if you have a time machine. Tachyons give you a time machine, especially if you reduce their energy. The world is very different from what we imagine if P=NP.
Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness In the Sky use an interesting theory about the speed of light and distance from centre of the galaxy. Basically the further out you live the faster you go. It also allows for more advanced technology. Earth is assumed(*) to be inside the slow zone so FTL is not possible and neither is AI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep
The final chapter of that is brilliant. I can imagine someone in Ireland in that situation just after all trans-Atlantic cables fail. Desperately trying to contact the USA 🙂
(*)A few humans have made it out and set up colonies but Earth remains out of reach from what I remember. Just some fabled land 🙂
Wow – what a coincidence. There’s a new novel in the series according to Wikipedia. Due out next month.
Oh and this bit amused me:
‘Vinge’s former wife, Joan D. Vinge, has also written stories in the Zones of Thought universe, based on his notes. These include “The Outcasts of Heaven Belt”, “Legacy”, and an upcoming novel featuring Pham Nuwen’
Sharing your creation with your ex-wife. Hmmm.
Well, they collaborated on stories when they were still married. (If you go to Joan Vinge’s web site you can read about this … but that info is three years old, so who knows. Vinge’s health has been poor for some time … but apparently she is finally able to really write again. That’s a relief … there are stories from her that I am still hoping to be able to read.)
Apparently there was an earlier experiment somewhere else that dismissed similar results as an obvious measuring error – weil nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf (roughly: because that which isn’t allowed cannot be) so the next couple of months will be interesting as people go back to previous results and do new experiments.
If it turns out that SF writers were right and physicists were wrong, that will be one hell of a party.
The results of the earlier experiment were with the limits of error, so didn’t actually prove anything.
The most serious objection I’ve seen so far to the current experiment is that the timing relies on the GPS system, which has uncertainties of up to 100 nanoseconds.
However, if you look at the research paper itself, they say they were using a special setup with Cs clocks integrated into the GPS system, and the timing error was 2.3 ± 0.9 ns.
The paper has the names of over 170 scientists who were involved, and it looks like they were pretty thorough in trying to eliminate any causes of error. But it’s still quite possible they are missing something. The whole experiment will have to be repeated elsewhere to ensure that some kind of error isn’t creeping in from the equipment or the methodology.
The full research paper is available in PDF format here:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1109/1109.4897.pdf
If you can reduce the energy of neutrinos–assuming they’re tachyons–you can make them travel faster. In fact, taking advantage of the non-uniqueness of inertial frames of reference, you have time-travel. It makes for a strange universe.
There is an interesting paper already out from Australian physicist John Costella, claiming that the error margins in the OPERA paper are wrong.
His conclusion is:
The full paper:
http://johncostella.webs.com/neutrino-blunder.pdf
His analysis looks reasonable to me, and my feeling is that however nice it would be to have FTL, time-travel, etc. this is not it.
The briefing is happening now, and the audience is getting into these issues with both hands. (Inductive results are ill-posed.) They’re planning follow-up experiments. They still haven’t seen tau events.
If this result holds up, today was the most important day since the moon landing. I’m glad I lived to see it.
Why don’t we wait for confirmation,if it’s the Science we’re interested in?
@paul
Homo sapiens loves to gossip.
read about that on /. and physorg … be fantastic if true, but I suspect some subtle flaw in the experimental setup will emerge.
heya- not a hard science geek ( don’t have the background of the math etc).. but I do remember a line from the movie K-pax, in which kevin spacey and *someone* were talking about relativity and the speed of light. the guy notes the impossibility of traveling faster than the speed of light according to einstein/info. Spacey corrects him, noting Einsien theorised it was impossible to break the barrier, he said nothing about things that could/did travel faster. Not exactly sure- but it sounded like he was saying: things which travel slower than the speed of light, cannot go faster than light/ accelerate beyond light. But that there could be things that did inherently travel faster than light. Does that sound correct/ familiar to anyone? Yes, this was a movie, but.. in this instance- I had and have the strong impression they were talking solid/ acceptable theoretical physics.
There is a theory that an unfound particle called tachyons cannot break the barrier from the other direction, ie cannot go as slow as light. Tachy—Gk particle for ‘speeding’ or ‘fast’. Actual lightspeed belongs to photons, or light-bits.
oh yes, tachyons. and quarks.. and I once upon a time theorised I was an amalgam of the two: a quarkyon.. something that pops up randomly faster than the speed of light.. 🙂
but if they have discovered something faster than the speed of light ( almost typed speed of life.. which is a whole nother kettle of fish:)… what is the distinction between the neutrino(?) they may have discovered and the theoretical tachyon?
My college physics teacher said he had seen experimental results, when he was in college, that involved fractional charge. That was before quarks were accepted theory, so the results were tossed out as experimental error.
From reading popular media articles (haven’t yet journeyed over to ArXiv where the pre-print of the Italian paper is supposed to be published), both the Fermilab/MINOS experiment and the CERN/Italy experiment have possibly seen neutrinos moving faster than light. The MINOS measurements were within the margin of error, though, so inconclusive. They’re down for an overhaul right now, and should be up and running in 2013, when they’ll be looking into this result, and trying to confirm/deny it. On the other side, there’s stellar and supernova data which don’t show any discrepancy with the arrival time of neutrinos and the speed of light. So it will be very interesting to see if we have a case of systematic measurement error, or if we have a special case (like Cherenkov radiation, but with neutrinos).
Note of personal bias: I actually had a chance to visit the MINOS experiment about 5 years ago, and it was really, really awesome. If being down a mineshaft a significant distance below the earth’s surface is your thing.