From Yahoo News:
CERN claims faster-than-light particle measured
GENEVA (AP) — Scientists at the world’s largest physics lab say they have clocked subatomic particles traveling faster than light, a feat that — if true — would break a fundamental pillar of science.
The readings have so astounded researchers that they are asking others to independently verify the measurements before claiming an actual discovery.
“This would be such a sensational discovery if it were true that one has to treat it extremely carefully,” said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, who was not involved in the experiment.
Nothing is supposed to move faster than light, at least according to Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity: The famous E (equals) mc2 equation. That stands for energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.
But neutrinos — one of the strangest well-known particles in physics — have now been observed smashing past this cosmic speed barrier of 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers).
Full story here: http://news.yahoo.com/cern-claims-faster-light-particle-measured-180644818.html
From the BBC:
Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.
The result – which threatens to upend a century of physics – will be put online for scrutiny by other scientists.
In the meantime, the group says it is being very cautious about its claims.
“We tried to find all possible explanations for this,” said report author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration.
“We wanted to find a mistake – trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects – and we didn’t,” he told BBC News.
“When you don’t find anything, then you say ‘Well, now I’m forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.’
Full story here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484
h/t’s to WUWT readers Peter Hodges and pearlandaggie
Clearly, the particle observed must have written a paper rebutting Spencer and Christie
I am highly, highly doubtful. There have been lots and lots of measurements of neutrino speed that disagree with this one.
One of the more famous is the supernova back in 1987 (I think) – the light and neutrinos showed up at the same time. Considering its distance, even the tiny difference that they think they’ve found here would have come out to be huge. We would have seen a neutrino surge long before the light showed up.
I think they claimed the neutrinos gained 60 billionths of a second in 2.4 milliseconds. If the supernova were merely 1 light year away, the neutrinos would have arrived about 788 seconds before the light. The supernova was 168,000 light years away, and so the neutrinos would have arrived about four years ahead of the light. We would have seen a very strong neutrino source in the sky suddenly appear 4 years before the supernova and then slowly taper away.
That’s not what we saw, though. We saw the neutrinos taper away at the same rate as the light from the supernova.
However, I am looking forward greatly to find out why the neutrinos are getting there first! This could be one of those “Huh, that’s weird” moments that results in a giant breakthrough!
Einstein was an old fart who didn’t know better ‘an to claim the speed of light because, well, the sun, the light, and all that belief. I wonder though did he believe his knowledge of his observations would not be trumped by future knowledge and new observations? So, essentially, a lot of people believe science is hacked into stone, rather ‘an fluid and dynamic and chaotic. :p
Someone call Joao Magueijo. However, quantum tunnelling hyothetically is the instantaneous (ininite speed?) travel of subatomic particals though I am not sure it has been proven to acceptable levels. So, simply FTL is somewhat slow by comparison. We were taught that neutrinos had no mass but only a “spin”. But this was long ago and I have read that recently it is thought that they do have some mass. Very interesting stuff. How does this all fit in with present day “settled science” in the world of physics?
I just have to add more – if accurate – this will go all the way back to the Big Bang itself as neutrinos were the dominant form of energy in the very early universe. Which brings to mind Guth and his inflationary universe model expanding faster than light – and on and on and on. Its gets more exciting as the implication begin to expand here – forgot to add – if accurate.
Further to Dave G’s comment.
Gran Sasso is at a higher altitude than CERN. Time is slower near mass, so time at CERN flows more slowly than at Gran Sasso because CERN is closer to the centre of the earth, while still at the surface of the earth. If there is an accurate atomic clock at CERN and another at San Grasso, and they compare them every day, they will find that the CERN clock gradually loses time relative to the San Grasso clock.
Did the researches allow for time going more slowly at CERN?
Actually, there was always the possibility of particles such as neutrinos having negative resting mass, it was a rather in vogue in the early 80’s and then died a death.
Until we understand what mass actually is, we will have trouble understanding what negative rest mass actually is.
All they have do is fire them both up and down a gravity well and see if their is a speed difference, now that will be an experiment.
“Nothing is supposed to move faster than light, at least according to Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity”
This is simply not true. The speed of light in vacuum is a mathematical limit. Although particles moving faster than light have never been observed, the existence of such particles is not in violation of Einstein’s special relativity.
Such hypothetic particles have been dubbed tachyons, and extensive mathematical research has been already been made in the field.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon
What special relativity does say, though, is that you can’t accelerate particles from below speed of light to above speed of light.
Ray, no, gravity travels at the speed of light. That’s been pretty well measured. Of course, you can say that the speed of neutrinos has been pretty well measured too, I guess.
All the measurements up until now have clocked neutrinos moving at light speed, as close as their error bars could tell anyway. If they don’t travel at light speed, they must be REALLY close to light speed: 0.9999999999999% or something like that. Otherwise we would have seen a major delay in the activity of the neutrinos from the 1987 supernova.
If I had to make a guess, I would say this is an issue with the difference between the speed of light in a vacuum, and the speed of light through whatever medium they are using to beam the light. (fiber optic cables?) My guess is that neutrinos aren’t slowed by passing through glass. Presumably they’ve also accounted for the slightly different paths that the light and neutrino would take. The light would follow the fiber, whereas the neutrinos are straight-line shots.
They’re smart guys there, a hell of a lot smarter than I am, so they’ve probably already accounted for those possibilities, but that’s my semi-layman’s guess.
I’m guessing some sort of undiscovered “bow wave” energy effect where earlier arriving and unassociated neutrinos are being raised to a higher state of energy, giving the appearance of association and early arrival. At the quantum level, strange connections happen in the interaction between particles and fields.
@ur momisugly Dan Santo: the neutrinos are passing through earth from CERN to Gran Sasso. Neutrinos don’t need any cable to pass through anything.
I’ve always had a problem with the light speed limit. It is counterintuitive. I have convinced myself I might be wrong but it has always nagged at me. Einstein was a wiz at intuitive science but I think he swallowed the math Kool-Aide. Not everything can be quantified in my opinion. He was a firm believer in mathematics even when the maths made no intuitive sence.
I am sad to read the Cern quote ““We wanted to find a mistake – trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects – and we didn’t,”. That’s just confirmation bias, you have to break through that if you are going to discover anything.
I too am highly doubtful. However I would like to point out that the physics of neutrinos is already in a total mess. The current model of the electroweak force requires that neutrinos be chiral particles – that they spin in only one direction relative to their direction of motion. But this is inherently impossible for a particle with mass (which neutrinos are now also assumed to have) travelling at less than the speed of light since you could chase after such a particle and pass it after which it would then appear to be spinning the opposite way.
A neutrino travelling at faster than the speed of light would solve this problem as it could have non-zero mass while still being inherently chiral.
huh? this is a science blog, right? so all of you know that relativity does not limit objects to below light speed – and, in fact, nature offers lots of stuff we model as having a physical existence (e.g. photons) that move at light speed. What the equations say is that the force needed to accelerate an object to c approaches infinity as v approaches c . So we can’t accelerate our space ship to c, have no idea how forces apply at c+, but have no problems fitting an object at c or c+ into the models.
These guys put their observations up to scrutiny and challenge ?
Watts Up With That ?
I always like to think Einstein’s theory shows where Trenberth’s missing heat may be hiding.
Mr. Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded researchers that they are asking others to independently verify the measurements before claiming an actual discovery.
“They are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they’ve done and really scrutinize it in great detail, and ideally for someone elsewhere in the world to repeat the measurements,” he said Thursday.”
===
Right away that is the difference between physics and climate science! EOM.
Humbug, big oil must be behind this.
i told people for a very long time just like the speed of sound was NOT a barrier of any sort…same thing with light how fast it moves creates NO barrier…there is NO reason at all why something could not move faster than light.
If borne out, what are some possible practical applications of faster than light particles?
The obvious explanation for the supernova observation could be that the neutrinos generated in that event were extremely energetic. Particles which travel faster than the speed of light travel slower (closer to the speed of light) the more energetic that they are. If the supernova neutrinos were massively energetic they would travel only a tiny fraction faster than the speed of light. The CERN neutrinos on the other hand, having a lot less energy, could travel faster.
As a followup to ecph’s post about tachyons, the inflationary theory, which is one of the best (and most widely accepted) guesses we yet have as to what happened shortly after the Big Bang, theorizes that the very early universe underwent a huge expansion, far faster than the speed of light.
So although cosmologists believe the universe to be less 14 billion years old, it’s may be as much as 93 billion light-years in diameter.
“The famous E (equals) mc2 equation.” This famous equation is indeed also a result of Einstein’s theory, but as such I don’t see how it implies anything about speed limits for particles. IIRC it is the Lorentz transformation that implies this speed limit.
So now Einstein joins Spencer and Christy as a scientist whose work is full of errors requiring corrections.
Interesting, thanks Anthony. Delighted it’s coming through at CERN. I already knew about faster-than-light research, there has already been quite a lot, in
junk scienceother corners of the universe that resemble WUWT in (a) careful observation etc as per scientific method (b) being ridiculed.Climate Science is not the only area of science to suffer extreme corruption where the real scientists and paradigm-shifters are isolated and ridiculed, even by other isolated groups. I look forward to the day when all the
pseudoscienceslegitimate challengers get to recognize and support each other.