Warp 9 Mr. Sulu! CERN accelerator shoots neutrinos faster than speed of light.

[Anti Federalist]

CERN scientists 'break the speed of light'

Scientists said on Thursday they recorded particles travelling faster than light - a finding that could overturn one of Einstein's fundamental laws of the universe.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8782895/CERN-scientists-break-the-speed-of-light.html

7:46PM BST 22 Sep 2011

Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said 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 centre 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 three years from CERN towards 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 said. "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.

[Legend1104]

This is all the governments fault! oh wait, sorry old habit.

[Aratus]

STAR TREK, yes! our universe is 'trek' universe!

[smhbbag]

^I^t is. The government monopoly on funding physics research creates artificial unanimity where it would not otherwise exist. That means the entire field can be led to bad theories that take far too long to undo.

I'm not saying if this is the case here, but it is the case in general. I happen to be one who has doubted much of special relativity for years, so I am very intrigued by this result, and look forward to egg on some faces.

However, the monopoly is so powerful in medicine, biology, physics - anything - that even outright contradictory evidence is ignored when the monopoly wants it to be. The only hope is that this one is very, very public.

[flightlesskiwi]

STAR TREK, yes! our universe is 'trek' universe!

beam me up, scottie....??

[Xenophage]

There a lot of theories circulating right now regarding this. Head over to physorg.com if you want the real skinny.

[amy31416]

Time travel here we come!

http://i.techrepublic.com.com/blogs/tardis.jpg

[TNforPaul45]

AF did you go and pull the actual scientific article regarding the discovery? I did...and um...yeah the News ARticle is much better :P

Imagine the instantaneous and faster than light communications this could lead to? We could send Ron Paul YouTube Videos to EVERYWHERE in the Galaxy simultaneously!!!

[Xenophage]

^I^t is. The government monopoly on funding physics research creates artificial unanimity where it would not otherwise exist. That means the entire field can be led to bad theories that take far too long to undo.

I'm not saying if this is the case here, but it is the case in general. I happen to be one who has doubted much of special relativity for years, so I am very intrigued by this result, and look forward to egg on some faces.

However, the monopoly is so powerful in medicine, biology, physics - anything - that even outright contradictory evidence is ignored when the monopoly wants it to be. The only hope is that this one is very, very public.

If someone in power thought there was some sort of political advantage to Special Relativity, you might have a case to make. Global Warming theories certainly make political power grabs easier to justify, for instance. As it stands, however, you're talking horseshit.

[Pizzo]

Ludicrous Speed

[madengr]

Would any of these large accelerators be built without government? Not choosing sides, just brining up the point.

[brushfire]

so did the particles go back in time?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzFmCCKQHns

[Simple]

They've been doing similar experiments from Jefferson lab here in Virginia: shooting neutrinos through the bedrock towards Minnesota. The head of the physics department here was talking about this today so its a pretty big deal.

[Kodaddy]

But are they faster than light in a vacuum?

[flightlesskiwi]

Time travel here we come!

http://i.techrepublic.com.com/blogs/tardis.jpg

George Carlin approves! (excellent)
582

[smhbbag]

If someone in power thought there was some sort of political advantage to Special Relativity, you might have a case to make. Global Warming theories certainly make political power grabs easier to justify, for instance. As it stands, however, you're talking horseshit.

You don't need politicians to care one way or the other for this to be true.

Physics research money comes from one place. If that one place is filled entirely with people who come from one perspective or theory, they will only send money to the research they think is substantive or important. That means they send money to people who think like they do.

Government funding has a narrowing and silencing effect on scientific inquiry, regardless of political implications of that science. If your results, or your expected results, run afoul of the established theories, you don't get money. Period. The only reason we know about this is because it was an accidental result.

If someone had a theory and expected to be able to send neutrinos faster than the speed of light, he NEVER would have gotten money and would have been maligned by his colleagues worse than Dr. Paul is by his fellow politicians. Laughing and ostracizing would be the response, with no more invitations to fancy gatherings of physicists.

[WilliamC]

Intriguing.

One moment please...

Here's the latest from Nature..


Particles break light-speed limit

Neutrino results challenge cornerstone of modern physics.

Geoff Brumfiel
Has OPERA found super-speedy neutrinos?CERN

An Italian experiment has unveiled evidence that fundamental particles known as neutrinos can travel faster than light. Other researchers are cautious about the result, but if it stands further scrutiny, the finding would overturn the most fundamental rule of modern physics — that nothing travels faster than 299,792,458 metres per second.

The experiment is called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus), and lies 1,400 metres underground in the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. It is designed to study a beam of neutrinos coming from CERN, Europe's premier high-energy physics laboratory located 730 kilometres away near Geneva, Switzerland. Neutrinos are fundamental particles that are electrically neutral, rarely interact with other matter, and have a vanishingly small mass. But they are all around us — the Sun produces so many neutrinos as a by-product of nuclear reactions that many billions pass through your eye every second.

The 1,800-tonne OPERA detector is a complex array of electronics and photographic emulsion plates, but the new result is simple — the neutrinos are arriving 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light allows. "We are shocked," says Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and OPERA's spokesman.
Breaking the law

The idea that nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum is the cornerstone of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, which itself forms the foundation of modern physics. If neutrinos are travelling faster than light speed, then one of the most fundamental assumptions of science — that the rules of physics are the same for all observers — would be invalidated. "If it's true, then it's truly extraordinary," says John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN.

Ereditato says that he is confident enough in the new result to make it public. The researchers claim to have measured the 730-kilometre trip between CERN and its detector to within 20 centimetres. They can measure the time of the trip to within 10 nanoseconds, and they have seen the effect in more than 16,000 events measured over the past two years. Given all this, they believe the result has a significance of six-sigma — the physicists' way of saying it is certainly correct. The group will present their results tomorrow at CERN, and a preprint of their results will be posted on the physics website ArXiv.org.

At least one other experiment has seen a similar effect before, albeit with a much lower confidence level. In 2007, the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment in Minnesota saw neutrinos from the particle-physics facility Fermilab in Illinois arriving slightly ahead of schedule. At the time, the MINOS team downplayed the result, in part because there was too much uncertainty in the detector's exact position to be sure of its significance, says Jenny Thomas, a spokeswoman for the experiment. Thomas says that MINOS was already planning more accurate follow-up experiments before the latest OPERA result. "I'm hoping that we could get that going and make a measurement in a year or two," she says.
Reasonable doubt

If MINOS were to confirm OPERA's find, the consequences would be enormous. "If you give up the speed of light, then the construction of special relativity falls down," says Antonino Zichichi, a theoretical physicist and emeritus professor at the University of Bologna, Italy. Zichichi speculates that the 'superluminal' neutrinos detected by OPERA could be slipping through extra dimensions in space, as predicted by theories such as string theory.

Ellis, however, remains sceptical. Many experiments have looked for particles travelling faster than light speed in the past and have come up empty-handed, he says. Most troubling for OPERA is a separate analysis of a pulse of neutrinos from a nearby supernova known as 1987a. If the speeds seen by OPERA were achievable by all neutrinos, then the pulse from the supernova would have shown up years earlier than the exploding star's flash of light; instead, they arrived within hours of each other. "It's difficult to reconcile with what OPERA is seeing," Ellis says.

Ereditato says that he welcomes scepticism from outsiders, but adds that the researchers have been unable to find any other explanation for their remarkable result. "Whenever you are in these conditions, then you have to go to the community," he says.

Extrodinary claims require extrodinary evidence. Sounds like they have some very solid results, but this is still very much preliminary. The observation of cosmic neutrinos from supernova is a welll-studied phenomena and if this contradicts the data from the CERN experiments I'm more inclined to think there is either some sort of systemic error in their experimental design.

But as this is science then it's only a matter of time before the issue will be subjected to the most intense scrutiny that we humans can put upon it, and we'll learn something new one way or the other.

I don't know enough about string theory to have an informed opinion as to the theoretical likelyhood of this being true, I'll have to do some more reading about this.

To infinity and beyond!

[WilliamC]

Would any of these large accelerators be built without government? Not choosing sides, just brining up the point.

I'm sure that someone would fund science in an economy where wealth wasn't taxed so heavily, but then again I have faith in human curiosity.

[Acala]

You don't need politicians to care one way or the other for this to be true.

Physics research money comes from one place. If that one place is filled entirely with people who come from one perspective or theory, they will only send money to the research they think is substantive or important. That means they send money to people who think like they do.

Government funding has a narrowing and silencing effect on scientific inquiry, regardless of political implications of that science. If your results, or your expected results, run afoul of the established theories, you don't get money. Period. The only reason we know about this is because it was an accidental result.

If someone had a theory and expected to be able to send neutrinos faster than the speed of light, he NEVER would have gotten money and would have been maligned by his colleagues worse than Dr. Paul is by his fellow politicians. Laughing and ostracizing would be the response, with no more invitations to fancy gatherings of physicists.

There is much truth in this. There have even been studies of funding and publication of research that proves that research proposals and papers that tend to support the "accepted" models are more often funded and more often published.

However, good science still gets done because there are still good scientists. They are not all whores. Not by a long shot.

[Acala]

I'm sure that someone would fund science in an economy where wealth wasn't taxed so heavily, but then again I have faith in human curiosity.

MOST science was done with private funding until after WWII. In fact much of it was self-funded. Nobody paid Einstein for his physics until after he had done his great work. Same with Goddard, Gibbs, Maxwell, and so on.

[Nate-ForLiberty]

Time travel here we come!

http://i.techrepublic.com.com/blogs/tardis.jpg


George Carlin approves! (excellent)
582


whoa

[acptulsa]

You just posted this to tease the cops, AF. Here's a neutrino breaking the law and the cops can't do a damned thing to catch it, much less beat it up.

It even outran their bullets...