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
>>>The was a young lady named bright
>>>Who could travel fasted than light
>>>She left Earth one day, in a relative way
>>>and came back the previous night.
.
There was a young man called Fisk,
Whose fencing was exceedingly brisk,
So fast was his action,
That the Lorentz contraction,
Turned his rapier into a disk !!
.
ScientistForTruth says:
September 22, 2011 at 2:40 pm
###
Calculating path length is the correct approach. Space is curved because of the Earths “Gravity Well” and the particles are traveling along a geodesic that is deeper in that well then the surface for most of the particles journey. That is the actual path length will be different then calculating the length from the position of the end points and using Euclidean geometry.
Nice,
Everything You Know is Wrong!
If they looked at all the other possibilities… then it must be man’s fault..
Neptune is 4.5 billion kilometers removed from the Sun. It takes light 15,000 seconds to travel from the Sun to Neptune. Yet this pair of bodies are attracted to where each other are NOW; there is an instant attraction between them. Therefore, the propagation of gravity is at least 15,000 times faster than the speed of light.
My money’s on Einstein. Faster-than-light requires infinite energy. Not about to happen in this universe.
Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is displacing phlogiston thus facilitating a higher local speed of light.
I wonder if there is a periodical difference in the speed. Not reported, but, how many observations has this speed difference been true??? over how long a length of time?? We;ve already had a report from Fermi, which i’ve not seen reported on since it appeared here at WUWT, that decay rates in certain elements vary according to periodical sun phases. Reported by the Chicago’s FERMILAB no less (not a Klinnsman-esque ‘dive in the box’ attempt to get more funding surely??).
Anyone seen ANNA???
(Anthony: You’ve been working too hard—Take a break: Take the wife and go see PLanet of the Apes. It;s brilliant!))
I love this quote from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8782895/CERN-scientists-break-the-speed-of-light.html
“”We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing,” he said. “We now want colleagues to check them independently.””
Wouldn’t it be nice of Mann, Jones or Hansen hadn’t been so corrupted by government money that they would adhere to the scientific method like this?
Matthew Schilling says:
September 22, 2011 at 8:07 pm
Matthew, this study may be of interest to you: http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/speed_of_gravity.asp
Sully Augustine says:
September 22, 2011 at 8:10 pm
Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is displacing phlogiston thus facilitating a higher local speed of light.
Say what?
Lets see what could be faster than light? hmmm, Dark maybe? It does seem to be there as soon as light is gone, or was it there all along hiding in the, well light? Sure there’s something faster than light or maybe the earth is flat and we should just stop looking. If you think we have all the answers now then just kick back and zone out into tv land and everything will be okay, or let us take these baby steps into the unknown as did Columbus. Thanks for listening you may now return to your bliss.
Isn’t Cerenkov radiation where charged particles travel faster than light? – at least the phase velocity of light within a particular medium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
This gives the blue glow from nuclear reactor cores.
No, Neptune is attracted to the time delayed gravity from Sol from 15,000 seconds ago. (Assuming your number is correct). Gravity travels at the speed of light. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity
So if Scottie where to suddenly teleport Sol to a galaxy far far away Neptune wouldn’t know about it for 15,000 seconds and would travel in it’s orbit for that long then veer off at a tangent when Sol’s gravity stopped.
I think this was discovered a couple of years ago.
How might this affect the idea that the apparent slowing of light through a BEC is an illusion of refraction?
Maybe there is just a higher concentration of Time in a BEC (inflated atoms).
Maybe there is a lower concentration of Time in the in the CERN experiment (compressed atoms).
Maybe Time is not a first order property of the universe, maybe Time arises in response to an absence of concentration of mass, inverse to Gravity.
Maybe what they found was not neutrinos traveling faster, just neutrinos traveling through a lower concentration of time.
I have for quite a few years tried to devise an experiment to show that Time is the opposite of Gravity, and that both are second order attributes of the universe.
This will be an interesting read, maybe.
Luboš ain’t buying it:
…..this error could erase most of the 60-nanosecond discrepancy…..
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/09/italian-out-of-tune-superluminal.html#more
His string theory math makes my head hurt. So I won’t argue with him, or much less with Einstein, on this one.
😉
Maybe somebody left a Dark Emitting Diode ON in the lab ? It might attract the neutrinos and cause them to speed up ?
Never heard of a Dark Emitting Diode (i.e. DED) ? , just plug a Light Emitting Diode (LED) into your AC power lines (or the “mains” in Europe) after that it emits dark whenever electricity is applied.
Okay that is a bit lame, but really they claim to know the absolute distance between two laboratory locations ~750,000 meters apart to better than ~ 20 meters ? And one (or maybe both) locations are inside a mountain. That’s some damn impressive surveying if you ask me.
Anybody remember the old Benny Hill skit about how hard it would be to drill a tunnel across the British Channel from both ends ? The reporter asks, “what happens if they don’t meet in the middle ?”. Benny’s response; “Well we get two tunnels for the price of one”.
Sparks said;
Does anyone recognize these numbers?
186.282 3.1047 189.3867
186.282 3.14159265 189.42359265
I see the speed of light (186.282) and pi (3.14159265) but I am not sure about the others …
pwl says:
September 22, 2011 at 9:01 pm
It seems to me that the “final” word on the propagation speed of gravity is still out.
See this quote from your Wikipedia source cited above:
“…
However, in the case of two gravitoelectrically interacting particle ensembles, such as two planets or stars moving at constant velocity with respect to each other, each body feels a force which is directed at the instantaneous position of the other body, without a speed-of-light delay. …”
The fact that the observed speed is just a tad faster than light, just a bit more than “statistically significant”, is a bit of a red flag for me. It suggests variability or error in the experiment. If FTL were not a fundemental limit, then we should expect to see relatively huge differences.
I have it filed in my Cold Fusion box
“neutrinos — one of the strangest well-known particles in physics”
Neutrinos are well-known?
Hmmmm.
Gravitation has to be instantaneous, I always believed. If you have a delay in gravitation…..all our attempts on calculating a curve of an object, for example planets…..would be very problematic ? Right?
So, thats why we nowadays says the earth is rolling around on the edge of a gravitational well in spacetime. As far as I understand it, this is how Einstein explained it back then.
But if we say gravitation is because of some particle, then that particle must have a speed.
If it has speed, we either have a delay in gravitation, or a particle moving faster than light….
Aha, now I get it! It is Global Warming that is upsetting the speed of light!