Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than light

[Kai Winn]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

A supernova recorded in the year 1987 in one of the Magellanic Clouds determined that neutrinos move at the same speed like light. The Neutrino burst arrived a couple of hours earlier than the light, but this was expained by that it was emitted earlier by the collapse of the star, and the surplus light when it blew up. The distance was somewhat greater than in the recent experiment at Cern, about 170,000 light years.
The speed of light can be beaten, for example by moving a laser beam from earth over the surface of the moon.

 

[JarodRussell]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

The speed of light can be beaten, for example by moving a laser beam from earth over the surface of the moon.

Not sure if serious.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

The speed of light can be beaten, for example by moving a laser beam from earth over the surface of the moon.

Not sure if serious.

Yeah, the locus of the impact point of the beam can move greater than c - however, the individual photons in the beam travel at c. No information can be transmitted by this method at a speed greater than c. People have also tried various ingenious methods to send information at the phase velocity of a wave component - which can be greater than c - but I believe they've always found that the information ends up effectively being received at the group velocity c. Which is why I think the maximal speed of information transfer is important - however, we don't really have a good definition of what constitutes information.

 

[Ronald Held]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

It need multiple independent confirmations before being accepted.

 

[tighr]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

I'm having a little difficulty with the idea of a particle that has "imaginary mass." I get how imaginary numbers work in math--it's like having a number line orthogonal to the "real" number line.

But how can something have "imaginary mass"? I can understand positive mass and zero mass. Is "imaginary mass" basically "negative mass"? Would that imply it exerts an anti-gravity force?

It makes sense that there would be such a thing as complex mass, in much the same way as other complex quantities exist. The imaginary component would exist in a plane of spacetime that is orthogonal to our currently understood 3 dimensions, so it also makes sense that we'd have a hard time visualizing it (we only perceive objects in 3 dimensions).

For example, a cube has 3 dimensions, a height, width, and length, and also has a mass. The complex portion of that cube's mass would be whatever portion of the hypercube that it belongs to that extends beyond the vertex of our 3rd dimension. But, since we can't visualize a hypercube, we have no way of knowing what that complex mass looks like.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

That description sounds like a phase shift - so yeah, ok I guess that could work as a pictorial description except that mass isn't usually represented as a vector in a coordinate space. I've also no idea how you would calculate interactions with ordinary tardyonic matter. I think I'll wait for the experts to decide what's going on and whether we need new physical laws.

 

[DrCorby]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

I was listening to the BBC World Service while getting ready for bed last night (about 2-3 AM US Eastern time?) when this story came up. I didn't catch the name of the scientist or correspondent that the presenter was talking to, but after the correspondent described what the CERN scientists thought they'd found, he admitted it was uncertain at this point and used the term "timey-whimey". Both men shared a chuckle at the the Doctor Who reference. I was very surprised but amused...

Did anyone else hear this?

More directly on-topic, very interesting stuff, if it wasn't just a computational error.

 

[JarodRussell]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

That would be pretty... awesome... I guess. Our entire modern day physics relys on c being the absolute maximum velocity. If that isn't true, all those theories are completely wrong, even though they happened to fit the facts for at least some time. Some other articles said that they have also failed to find the Higgs Boson at the places they were looking for. So either it's somewhere else, or doesn't exist at all. And then everything is upside down, turned around and back to front.

 

[trekvix]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

time travel

haha as far as I'm understanding the discussions I've been taking in -- say they test it again and again and conclude that neutrinos can move .0025% FTL -- it doesn't so much throw out old or current laws and understandings as it does throw open a whole new expanse of possibility, largely in the arena of making certain hypotheses in string theory more likely and more worth researching. A point of difficulty would be in the reconciliation of the finding with relativity, because it cannot exactly overthrow relativity as some people are quick to shout, but it calls to question previous experiments and data that prove the workings of relativity.

Einstein didn't demolish Newton, his findings just meant that our understandings had to be adjusted. Gravity was not disproved, our understanding of how it works, and our conception of the fabric of space and time, was just restructured or modified or what you will.

And yes, that neutrinos can move faster than c has been suspected for some time, just not tested with nearly this much certainty.

And really, our understanding of the universe is always changing, very fluidly, and very much like a puzzle with pieces missing from the pile and pieces that don't seem to fit anywhere, our entire intellectual history has seen so many changes and updates and reworkings, that's just how physics is!

YAY SCIENCE!

hehe

 

[tighr]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

Maybe the neutrinos are dropping into subspace or hyperspace?

Makes sense to me. They're not really traveling faster than light, just traveling at a speed that is faster than the equivalent speed of light in our dimension. In their dimension, they are obeying all the laws of that dimension's physics.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

Instead of focusing on those hyperspace things, try to realize the truth: There is no neutrino.

 

[trekvix]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

^ AHHHAHA

 

[Shurik]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

This is an interesting result, but it will have to be confirmed by multiple observations and published in a respected journal before any of us can fantasize about FTL flight and such.
Something a bit similar happened with the discovery of quasi-crystals - crystals with symmetry that was considered impossible:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasicrystal

The guy who first observed them is currently a distinguished professor in my former faculty, he taught an introductory materials engineering courses when I did my bachelor's degree there. He told us that initially no one believed him and it took him about 2 years to publish the paper on his discovery, and then other people started to get the same results.

 

[McDuff]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

I'm not a great physicist but I always intuitively figure out that Light shouldn't be the fastest sub-atomic particle in the universe. I always found a bit too convenient that one of the most important thing for us humans, light, happens to be the fastest thing in the world.

I'm always guessed intuitively (backed by no knowledge or research at all) that we will eventually find out that there's a whole range of sub-subatomic particles which are faster than light in some kind of hierarchy of speed.

For example, today, if true, we discover neutrinos as the fastest, then we will discover something called the Z particles as the fastest, then the ikox particles, and so on.

Maybe we will discover, as some form of high concept, that the limit of those sub-subatomic particles speeds, that there exist something that has no speed and have limitless speed at the same time. "Something" that is everywhere but nowhere at the same time. Clearly the "fastest" (and the slowest at the same time) particle. Or something like that.

 

[JarodRussell]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

Haha, the human need to feel right after all. "I'm not a physicist, but I always felt something was wrong there." No offense, but that's pretty funny.

 

[McDuff]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

Haha, the human need to feel right after all. "I'm not a physicist, but I always felt something was wrong there." No offense, but that's pretty funny.

You say that but you don't have to be a scientist to see the pattern of science knowledge in history. Every laws are ultimately refined and even changed with time. Now it's quantum mechanics, but in a couple of hundred years or less they will probably find some more basic laws which describe the relationship between matter. Where they will describe what happens at the quantum level as macro level.

Don't you see that kind of pattern in human knowledge? Do you really think we are now very close to the summon of knowledge? We can guess intuitively that we will learn about much more fundamental laws of nature in the future which will super-seed the quantum mechanics laws for example at a sub micro or sub-sub atomic level. I guess it's about recognizing the patterns in the history of science.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

I'm not a great physicist but I always intuitively figure out that Light shouldn't be the fastest sub-atomic particle in the universe. I always found a bit too convenient that one of the most important thing for us humans, light, happens to be the fastest thing in the world.

I'm always guessed intuitively (backed by no knowledge or research at all) that we will eventually find out that there's a whole range of sub-subatomic particles which are faster than light in some kind of hierarchy of speed.

For example, today, if true, we discover neutrinos as the fastest, then we will discover something called the Z particles as the fastest, then the ikox particles, and so on.

Maybe we will discover, as some form of high concept, that the limit of those sub-subatomic particles speeds, that there exist something that has no speed and have limitless speed at the same time. "Something" that is everywhere but nowhere at the same time. Clearly the "fastest" (and the slowest at the same time) particle. Or something like that.

We have already discovered Z (and W) particles, which mediate the weak nuclear force and are known to have rest mass and to travel at sublight speeds. I assume the "ikox" is named for Prof. Brian Cox - the "i" standing for imaginary.

 

[iguana_tonante]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

I'm not a great physicist but I always intuitively figure out that (...)

I'm always guessed intuitively (backed by no knowledge or research at all) that (...)

 

[Deckerd]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

Those are my kinda scientific observations. Good name too.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Re: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than ligh

Was he from his mother's womb untimely ripped, 'though?