CERN Faster-than-light travel

[Edward64]

Pretty interesting, hope its true.

Gone in 60 nanoseconds - The Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/gone-in-60-nanoseconds/2011/10/06/gIQAf1RERL_story.html?hpid=z3)
The world as we know it is on the brink of disintegration, on the verge of dissolution. No, I’m not talking about the collapse of the euro, of international finance, of the Western economies, of the democratic future, of the unipolar moment, of the American dream, of French banks, of Greece as a going concern, of Europe as an idea, of Pax Americana — the sinews of a postwar world that feels today to be unraveling.

I am talking about something far more important. Which is why it made only the back pages of your newspaper, if it made it at all. Scientists at CERN, the European high-energy physics consortium, have announced the discovery of a particle that can travel faster than light.

Neutrinos fired 454 miles from a supercollider outside Geneva to an underground laboratory in Gran Sasso, Italy, took less time (60 nanoseconds less) than light to get there. Or so the physicists think. Or so they measured. Or so they have concluded after checking for every possible artifact and experimental error.

The implications of such a discovery are so mind-boggling, however, that these same scientists immediately requested that other labs around the world try to replicate the experiment. Something must have been wrong — some faulty measurement, some overlooked contaminant — to account for a result that, if we know anything about the universe, is impossible.

And that’s the problem. It has to be impossible because, if not, if that did happen on this Orient Express hurtling between Switzerland and Italy, then everything we know about the universe is wrong.

[JediKooter]

...then everything we know about the universe is wrong.

That's a bold statement. I mean everyone knows that Joe Buck is one of the worst announcers in the universe regardless of these tests.

[MacroGuru]

That's a bold statement. I mean everyone knows that Joe Buck is one of the worst announcers in the universe regardless of these tests.

Well, who knows...in an alternate dimension he could be the best announcers...and we could be neglecting said dimension.......No, who am I kidding, he would suck in any dimension..

[JediKooter]

Well, who knows...in an alternate dimension he could be the best announcers...and we could be neglecting said dimension.......No, who am I kidding, he would suck in any dimension..

E=mc2 for the win!!!

[Tigercat]

Sportsdigs had my reply to this thread 60 nanoseconds before I even hit send.

[sterlingice]

I need to check out my SciFri podcasts because I'm sure they've touched on this in the last couple of weeks after this was discovered

SI

[BishopMVP]

I thought it's been known(/theorized) for awhile that there were particles that travel faster than the speed of light - but the thinking was that nothing could cross that barrier.

[JPhillips]

Will this make my commute faster?

[JediKooter]

Will this make my commute faster?

Only if you can achieve infinite(sorry can't resist) mass...transit.

[dzilla77]

This shouldn't surprise anyone, the Lions are 4-0.

[Marc Vaughan]

Alternatively the measurement of the distance covered is off by literally a few yards in those 454 miles ... call me cynical but guess which I think is more likely ;)

[Fonzie]

From what I've read, the CERN scientists responsible for this finding are as skeptical as anyone. They've supposedly examined the measurement error issue ad nauseum and not been able to come up with an explanation, which is why they released these results to the broader community. They wanted to get input from other physicists as to how they might account for this finding.

I'm skeptical as well, but the prospect of this being a genuine discovery is quite exciting.

[Edward64]

Nobel prize for sure if validated.

[saldana]

from what i read when this first came out a few weeks ago, it might not be the first time this has been seen...another lab got similar results a few years ago, but their standard deviation for the speed was a lot greater than CERNs, so the results were dismissed because it fell within the +/-.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/22/cern-light-speed_n_977014.html

[Mustang]

Not surprising, I mean how else are you going to make the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.

[Edward64]

Fermilab in the mix to duplicate the results.

Fermilab Scientists Testing Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Claims | Science and Technology | English (http://www.voanews.com/english/news/science-technology/Fermilab-Scientists-Testing-Faster-Than-Light-Neutrino-Claims-131391688.html)Plunkett is not convinced. Not yet. “Skepticism is something we always bring to the table anytime there is a revolutionary claim like this," he said.

“Before we throw away a cherished principle we have to, of course, check that this result, which is a very interesting result, is confirmed by other sources," said Fox.

One of the “other sources” is the MINOS experiment at Fermilab. Located in a massive underground tunnel, MINOS shoots a particle beam through the earth to another, offsite location. Scientists at the lab clock how fast the particles travel.

“It is likely that the MINOS experiment is one of the best checks that can be done on this measurement," said Plunkett.

But Plunkett says it is easy to make a mistake when trying to measure something as small as a neutrino. He believes the MINOS facility, with an upgrade, can provide a more precise measure of the CERN results. “Our plans are to upgrade this equipment using a system of atomic clocks, much like what they had in the European experiment, to in fact do a measurement that is more precise than theirs, in many ways," he said.

But if MINOS, too, clocks a neutrino traveling faster than the speed of light, theorists like Patrick Fox will have their work cut out for them, designing a new foundation for future physics research.

[Dutch]

E=mc2 for the win!!!


If this theory is suddenly defective, what are the ramifications of that?

[Danny]

If this theory is suddenly defective, what are the ramifications of that?

Ludicrous Speed

[SteveMax58]

If this theory is suddenly defective, what are the ramifications of that?

It means Charlie Sheen will be looking to snort some of these Neutrinos and will pay up for it.

[GrantDawg]

If this theory is suddenly defective, what are the ramifications of that?


I don't know. Every time I read about this stuff, I feel like a monosyllabic caveman. "Me no know. Me need club."

[terpkristin]

The Bad Astronomer did a pretty good follow-up (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/10/15/followup-ftl-neutrinos-explained-not-so-fast-folks/) to this.

If you haven’t heard about the experiment that apparently showed that subatomic particles called neutrinos might move faster than light (what we in the know call FTL, to make us look cooler), then I assume this is your first time on the internet. If that’s the case, then you can read my writeup on what happened (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/22/faster-than-light-travel-discovered-slow-down-folks/).
Basically, neutrinos move very very fast, almost at the speed of light. Some scientists created neutrinos at CERN in Geneva, and then measured how long it took them to reach a detector called OPERA, located in Italy. When they did the math, it looked like the neutrinos actually got there by traveling a hair faster than the speed of light! 60 nanoseconds faster, to be accurate.
Was relativity doomed?
Nope. In fact, relativity may very well be what saves the day here.

First, most scientists were skeptical. Even the people running the experiment were skeptical, and were basically asking everyone else for help. They figured they might have made a mistake as well, and couldn’t figure out what had happened. Relativity is an extremely well-tested theory (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/04/08/a-very-smart-kid-and-a-solid-theory/), and doesn’t (easily) allow for FTL. Despite some headlines screaming that Einstein might be wrong, most everyone figured the problem lay elsewhere.
Most everyone zeroed in on the timing of the experiment, which has to be extremely accurate. The entire flight time of a neutrino from Switzerland to Italy is only about 2.4 milliseconds, and the measurement accuracy needs to be to only a few nanoseconds — mind you, a nanosecond is a billionth of a second!
The scientists used a very sophisticated GPS setup to determine the timing, so that has been the focus of a lot of scrutiny as well. And a new paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.2685) just posted on the Physics Preprint Archive may have the answer… and it uses relativity.

Basically, what Einstein found is that the speed of light is the same for all observers. If I’m moving at 0.9 times the speed of light toward you and turn on my flashlight, I see those photons moving away from me at the speed of light. The thing is, you see those photons moving toward you at the speed of light! This goes against common sense, which tells us that velocities add together; if I throw a baseball out car window, the velocity of the ball add to that of the car.
But light doesn’t behave that way. And this changes a lot of things, including how two objects moving relative to each other measure distance, and even how they measure time. I might measure a meter stick in my hand as being (duh) one meter long, but an observer moving past me at a significant fraction of the speed of light would see it being shorter. It’s just a consequence of the Universe making sure we all see the same speed of light.
And that’s where neutrinos come in. In this new paper, author Ronald A.J. van Elburg lays out his case. The timing was measured using a GPS satellite orbiting the Earth, and moving relative to CERN and OPERA. That means the distance traveled by the neutrinos would be less as measured by the GPS sat as it would be from the ground, and therefore wouldn’t take as long to cover it. Doing the detailed math, van Elburg calculates how much faster the neutrinos would be expected to arrive accounting for the satellite’s motion, and he gets… 64 nanoseconds. That’s almost exactly the discrepancy measured by the original experimenters.
Case closed!
Well, maybe. As I recall from the foofooraw that unfolded after the initial announcement, the original experimenters said they accounted for all relativistic effects. The paper they published (http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897), however, didn’t include the details of how they did this, so it’s not clear what they included and what they might have left out. It’s possible van Elburg might be right, but I expect we haven’t seen the end of this. After all, not long after the announcement, a physicist asked (http://plus.google.com/108952536790629690817/posts/SsJJABfcJ7y) if they had accounted for gravitational time dilation — like relative velocity, gravity can also affect the flow of time, throwing off the measurement — and the experimenters said they had.
I had thought of something like this as well. CERN and OPERA are at different latitudes, and since the Earth rotates (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/27/the-pressure-of-living-on-a-spinning-planet/), they are moving around the Earth’s axis at different speeds. Could that be it? I did the math (http://plus.google.com/108952536790629690817/posts/aaUnKZqA924), and the answer is no. Too bad; it would’ve been fun to be the person to have figured this out!
The bottom line here is that this experiment is still very interesting. I don’t think we know exactly what’s going on here yet — my bet is still on the statistics, since they didn’t measure the speeds of individual neutrinos, but clouds of them, making the exact timing much harder — but it’s hard to say. Like most other scientists, I think somewhere down the line here a mistake was made, and the neutrinos, like everything else we know of made of matter, travel slower than light. But if we’re wrong, then we get new physics, which is great! And if we’re right and figure out how, it means that future experiments will benefit from this. Win/win.
Either way, my bet is that we’re not done here. This new result is interesting and may very well be right, and be the dampening field that bursts the neutrino FTL warp bubble. But I’ll wait for the reaction from the original experimenters to see what they say. If we’ve learned one thing from all this, it’s that it’s best not to jump to conclusions.

[JediKooter]

If this theory is suddenly defective, what are the ramifications of that?

How did I miss this? :)

Good question. I think the thing that sticks out to me when people talk about the speed of light, the number is for the speed of light in a vacuum. I'm not sure if this experiment was done in a vacuum or not. Either way though, I don't think E=mc2 is wrong, it just may not end up being applicable to everything or it may need a modification, or is absorbed into a different equation, or it might have a very very slim chance that it may be abandoned.

There could be some very cool discoveries in the years to come because of this and I find that very exciting.

[Chief Rum]

This thread delivers.

[Edward64]

Still hoping its true ...

Second experiment indicates faster-than-light particles - The Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/second-experiment-confirms-faster-than-light-particles/2011/11/17/gIQAlRlTWN_story.html)
A second experiment at the European facility that reported subatomic particles zooming faster than the speed of light — stunning the world of physics — has reached the same result, scientists said late Thursday.

The “positive outcome of the [second] test makes us more confident in the result,” said Fernando Ferroni, president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, in a statement released late Thursday. Ferroni is one of 160 physicists involved in the international collaboration known as OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion Tracking Apparatus) that performed the experiment.

While the second experiment “has made an important test of consistency of its result,” Ferroni added, “a final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world.”

[JediKooter]

a final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world.

This definitely needs to be done by a third, forth and fifth party that is not involved with the original group. This would be awesome if it doesn't go the way of the cold fusion experiments.

[Scoobz0202]

Welp:


But now, ScienceInsider is reporting that there was a good reason the measurements and reality weren't lining up: a loose fiber optic cable was causing one of the atomic clocks used to time the neutrinos' flight to produce spurious results.


Faster-than-light neutrino result reportedly a mistake caused by loose cable (http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/02/faster-than-light-neutrino-result-apparently-a-mistake-due-to-loose-cable.ars)

[JediKooter]

Looks like I need to cancel my DeLorean order...

[albionmoonlight]

I'll take Most Boring Explanation Possible for $200, Alex.

[terpkristin]

I love how "news" sites are reporting this and STILL aren't reporting it in its entirety.

Nature News Blog: Faster-than-light neutrino measurement has two possible errors (http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/02/faster-than-light-neutrino-measurement-has-two-possible-errors.html)

/tk

[Scoobz0202]

I love how "news" sites are reporting this and STILL aren't reporting it in its entirety.

Nature News Blog: Faster-than-light neutrino measurement has two possible errors (http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/02/faster-than-light-neutrino-measurement-has-two-possible-errors.html)

/tk

In their defense, the link I posted did add that very link to the end of their article.

[JediKooter]

Not knowing much about neutrinos and how they behave in particular mediums, I would think a loose cable would slow it down rather than show a increase in speed?

[QuikSand]

http://msnbcmedia3.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/z_Projects_in_progress/050418_Einstein/050405_einstein_tongue.widec.jpg

[QuikSand]

While I have an affinity for these topics, it's still at a completely lay level.

But that said... if your experiment seemingly says that everything we think we know is wrong, don't you do at least one trip around the car to kick the tires before you contact the Nobel committee directly? A loose cable??? Really???

[Drake]

I didn't think they announced these findings as success. My impression was that they announced them essentially as a plea to the scientific community to help them figure out where they were messing up, because the results couldn't be right.

And, as so often happens, the media drew its own conclusions and ran with it from there...

[QuikSand]

I know, I just think my version sounds funnier.

[Coffee Warlord]

While I have an affinity for these topics, it's still at a completely lay level.

But that said... if your experiment seemingly says that everything we think we know is wrong, don't you do at least one trip around the car to kick the tires before you contact the Nobel committee directly? A loose cable??? Really???

I have to assume they did look very hard for any kind of physical faults. But given the complexity of this stuff, I'm sure it's very, very easy to miss.

Personally, I think they handled it exactly right. Once they were fairly sure they couldn't find anything wrong, they effectively came out and said: "Hey. This is weird. Give us a hand and help us figure out what we're missing here."

And...lo and behold, someone found out what they were missing.

[Coffee Warlord]

I know, I just think my version sounds funnier.

You mean we're going to break the speed of light because some asshole forgot to plug in a power cord?!?!?

[QuikSand]

I guess in my defense... from the original article a phrase like "Or so they have concluded after checking for every possible artifact and experimental error." sure sounds like they would have already done things like check the equipment used in the measurement. Just sayin'. Maybe it's the media's fault in part, but I suspect these CERN guys just got lazy. It happens.

[JediKooter]

I guess in my defense... from the original article a phrase like "Or so they have concluded after checking for every possible artifact and experimental error." sure sounds like they would have already done things like check the equipment used in the measurement. Just sayin'. Maybe it's the media's fault in part, but I suspect these CERN guys just got lazy. It happens.

I guess they weren't really...wait for it...wait for it...CERNtain?

[booradley]

I guess they weren't really...wait for it...wait for it...CERNtain?

AAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHH!!! Sorry - just couln't let you get away with that

[rowech]

I feel like there is an episode of "Big Bang Theory" in here somewhere.

[JediKooter]

AAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHH!!! Sorry - just couln't let you get away with that

Hehe! Call me Commander Cheese. :D

[Kodos]

There's no need for conCERN

[JediKooter]

I'm surprised that they weren't able to disCERN what the problem was, sooner.

[terpkristin]

Actually, the Nature blog article has a funny (well, funny to me) comment on the story. Reminded me of something Sheldon Cooper would say...

Not likely that either of these “two possible errors” will resolve the matter. GPS itself is where the flaw is. http://physicsnext.org has been saying for over a month: OPERA Experiment and its flawed GPS Measurements cause neutrinos to appear superluminal. Speed = Distance / Time. If measured this way the neutrinos will not be faster than light, provided Distance and Time can be correctly measured. But OPERA used the latest technology – GPS, which adjusts time according to relativity’s equations. Such adjustments are erroneous (details below). (Site also links to a fun must-read New York Times story about GPS). So in OPERA’s physics, Speed = (GPS Measured Distance) / (GPS Measured Time). You can get neutrinos back under light speed if you can eliminate GPS from the measurements. Relativity-worshipping physicists can (and probably will) escape the faster-than-light neutrinos dilemma by dodging GPS and thus dodging relativistic time equations. So relativity-worshippers may well have the last laugh. But look at the irony – they have to escape from relativity’s GPS time adjustments to fix the neutrino issue and save relativity’s light postulate! But they would have this rhyme back again – “If nothing travels faster than light then Einstein’s theory is right!” Mediocre minds (i.e. just about everyone in today’s world of physics) would then again dance to the line, ignoring the detail that relativity’s time equations caused the problem. Truly, a dance of the non-thinking crowd! Reality is more complex: Einstein’s Postulates are Correct but Einstein’s equations (derived from postulates) are WRONG, and correct equations are in paper at http://physicsnext.org! So GPS makes adjustments based on wrong equations. (If special relativity’s equations are wrong then general relativity, of course, is history too!) A COUNTER-EXAMPLE exists that PROVES that (though Einstein’s postulates are correct), Einstein’s claim of having derived the Lorentz transformations is wrong, yes a COUNTER-EXAMPLE — and at least one Nobel Prize winner takes this realization seriously. See paper at http://physicsnext.org/ for details, a very simple read, but majority be warned… facing physics reality regarding the foundations could disturb a mediocre mind and make you react emotionally…for example, Howard Georgi got very angry!

/tk

[bulletsponge]

Well, who knows...in an alternate dimension he could be the best announcers...and we could be neglecting said dimension.......No, who am I kidding, he would suck in any dimension..

thank god the tests were wrong. i didnt want to live in a universe where Joe Buck is a good announcer

[JediKooter]

thank god the tests were wrong. i didnt want to live in a universe where Joe Buck is a good announcer

If you subscribe to the Infinite Universes theory, then there is a universe out there where every announcer is Joe Buck.

[NorvTurnerOverdrive]

If you subscribe to the Infinite Universes theory, then there is a universe out there where every announcer is Joe Buck.
http://g.images.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/15112350.jpg

[JediKooter]

Whoa!

[Chief Rum]

While I have an affinity for these topics, it's still at a completely lay level.

But that said... if your experiment seemingly says that everything we think we know is wrong, don't you do at least one trip around the car to kick the tires before you contact the Nobel committee directly? A loose cable??? Really???

The article read indicated they sat on this one for months before announcing. It sounded like they did the test several times and kept getting the same or similar results. Of course if no one noticed the loose cable...

[molson]

I don't see what the big hurry is anyway, the speed of light is plenty fast enough.

[BishopMVP]

Just sayin'. Maybe it's the media's fault in part, but I suspect these CERN guys just got lazy. It happens.Yeah, they're notorious for being lazy ;) I assume/prefer that the story is similar to my favorite DoD fuckup/urban legend involving the Patriot missile system - where every underling checked and re-rechecked their calculations for months until the Nobel Prize winning Physicist retired - and they realized he had been rounding off gravity to -10m/s in the overall calculations.

[JonInMiddleGA]

http://sphotos.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/427551_379839928711117_111815475513565_1412632_399386331_n.jpg