CERN Discovers Neutrinos That Travel Faster Than Light... FTL Possible

CoolTraderDude · Sep 24, 2011

(Reuters) - An international team of scientists said on Thursday they had recorded sub-atomic particles traveling faster than light -- a finding that could overturn one of Einstein's long-accepted fundamental laws of the universe.

Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the researchers, told Reuters that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.

"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."

If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

That assertion, which has withstood over a century of testing, is one of the key elements of the so-called Standard Model of physics, which attempts to describe the way the universe and everything in it works.

The totally unexpected finding emerged from research by a physicists working on an experiment dubbed OPERA run jointly by the CERN particle research center near Geneva and the Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy.

A total of 15,000 beams of neutrinos -- tiny particles that pervade the cosmos -- were fired over a period of 3 years from CERN toward Gran Sasso 730 (500 miles) km away, where they were picked up by giant detectors.

Light would have covered the distance in around 2.4 thousandths of a second, but the neutrinos took 60 nanoseconds -- or 60 billionths of a second -- less than light beams would have taken.

"It is a tiny difference," said Ereditato, who also works at Berne University in Switzerland, "but conceptually it is incredibly important. The finding is so startling that, for the moment, everybody should be very prudent."

Ereditato declined to speculate on what it might mean if other physicists, who will be officially informed of the discovery at a meeting in CERN on Friday, found that OPERA's measurements were correct.

"I just don't want to think of the implications," he told Reuters. "We are scientists and work with what we know."

Much science-fiction literature is based on the idea that, if the light-speed barrier can be overcome, time travel might theoretically become possible.

The existence of the neutrino, an elementary sub-atomic particle with a tiny amount of mass created in radioactive decay or in nuclear reactions such as those in the Sun, was first confirmed in 1934, but it still mystifies researchers.

It can pass through most matter undetected, even over long distances, and without being affected. Millions pass through the human body every day, scientists say.

To reach Gran Sasso, the neutrinos pushed out from a special installation at CERN -- also home to the Large Hadron Collider probing the origins of the universe -- have to pass through water, air and rock.

The underground Italian laboratory, some 120 km (75 miles) to the south of Rome, is the largest of its type in the world for particle physics and cosmic research.

Around 750 scientists from 22 different countries work there, attracted by the possibility of staging experiments in its three massive halls, protected from cosmic rays by some 1,400 metres (4,200 feet) of rock overhead.

(Reporting by Robert Evans; Editing by Tom Miles and Kevin Liffey)
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http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/22/us-science-light-idUSTRE78L4FH20110922

nitro · Sep 24, 2011

Sean Carroll thinks it is probably a mis-calibration somewhere:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/09/23/faster-than-light-neutrinos/

If true, it would be on the front page of every newspaper in the world, and it would be talked about for months on every scientific journal in the world. It is that unlikely.

But who knows? Neutrinos are extremely weird and could point to new physics. I have always thought that the distinction between fermions and bosons was too narrow (SuperSymmetry says they are not different). Neutrinos may be something else altogether, or at least a weird hybrid. Maybe neutrinos are tachyon "decay" that crossed some threshold physics and in fact are slowing down, just that they slow down slightly faster than light? In other words, these are not particles that were accelerated past the speed of light, but particles that slowed down to the speed of light. It could also prove higher dimensions which would show no violation of the speed of light but that particles took higher dimensional shortcuts. The implications are enormous.

Neutrino switches here we come. CSCO JNPR and the whole fiber optic world would be wondering how to make neutrino electronics - or neutonics

CoolTraderDude · Sep 24, 2011

Quote from nitro:

Sean Carroll thinks it is probably a mis-calibration somewhere:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/09/23/faster-than-light-neutrinos/

If true, it would be on the front page of every newspaper in the world, and it would be talked about for months on every scientific journal in the world. It is that unlikely.

But who knows? Neutrinos are extremely weird and could point to new physics. I have always thought that the distinction between fermions and bosons was too narrow (SuperSymmetry says they are not different). Neutrinos may be something else altogether, or at least a weird hybrid. Maybe neutrinos are tachyon "decay" that crossed some threshold physics and in fact are slowing down, just that they slow down slightly faster than light? In other words, these are not particles that were accelerated past the speed of light, but particles that slowed down to the speed of light.

Neutrino switches here we come. CSCO JNPR and the whole fiber optic world would be wondering how to make neutrino electronics - or neutonics
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It made a lot of headlines...

According to your source...

Here thatâs not quite true, although we should at least mention that Fermilabâs MINOS experiment also saw evidence for faster-than-light neutrinos, albeit at a woefully insignificant level. More relevant is the fact that we have completely independent indications that neutrinos do travel at the speed of light, from Supernova 1987A. If the OPERA results are naively taken at face value, the SN 87A should have arrived a couple of years before we saw the explosion using good old-fashioned photons. But perhaps we should resist being naive; the SN 87A events were electron neutrinos, not muon neutrinos, and they were at substantially lower energies. If neutrinos do violate the light barrier, itâs completely consistent to imagine that they do so in an energy-dependent way, so the comparison is subtle.
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http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/09/23/faster-than-light-neutrinos/

Fermilabs also noticed the same thing... CERN gives a 6 sigma (Standard Deviation) to the event so it isn't a small statistical anomaly...

A mis-calibration is possible considering how complicated every piece of equipment at CERN is but I doubt it.

hoodooman · Sep 24, 2011

I didn't read all the references but it would be interesting to know just how much faster these particles.

CoolTraderDude · Sep 24, 2011

I think everyone might be wondering why neutrinos can go faster than light (besides experimental error)...

Here is a theory...

In 1985 it was proposed by Chodos et al. that neutrinos can have a tachyonic nature.[34][35] Today, the possibility of having standard particles moving at superluminal speeds is a natural consequence of unconventional dispersion relations that appear in the Standard-Model Extension,[36][37][38] a realistic description of the possible violation of Lorentz invariance in field theory. In this framework, neutrinos experience Lorentz-violating oscillations and can travel faster than light at high energies.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino

Personally, I hope the results hold up to further scrutiny...

CoolTraderDude · Sep 24, 2011

Quote from hoodooman:

I didn't read all the references but it would be interesting to know just how much faster these particles.
More...

Well yeah they say that in the article but they should give it in actual speed measurement that everyone can understand...

According to same Wiki source...

The OPERA results, in contrast, suggested that neutrinos were traveling faster than light by a factor of 1 in 40,000
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino

I'll try and do a metric calculation and hopefully I get it right...

Speed of Light... "c" = 299792458 m/s or 299792.458 km/s...

We will multiply this by 1/40000, and get 7.4948 km/s... Which means that the neutrinos are travelling about 7.5 kilometers (or about 4.68 miles) per second faster than the speed of light.

hoodooman · Sep 24, 2011

186,000 miles per second times 1.000025 = 186,004.65.

BSAM · Sep 24, 2011

So, does all this mean Obama won't win reelection?

hoodooman · Sep 24, 2011

I wonder how this correlates with the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle>

Covertibility · Sep 25, 2011

Total cost of this giant POS is roughly $4 billion.

CERN was suppose to find the Higgs boson, they didn't. What a waste of money.

For $4 billion a space elevator could've been built out in the Pacific.