Speed barrier broken

[Yosarian2]

Looks like people are getting over-excited before its been confirmed conclusively.

its actually the second experiment to get such a result. This one just had a better margin of error

That being said, I'd still give something like 20 to 1 odds that this turns out to not, in fact, be an actual example of something traveling FTL. Especially since neutrinos actually have mass.

It would be awesome if true, of course.

[Yosarian2]

Physicist Michael Brooks on CERN scientists' neutrino discovery: It's quite possible they took a shortcut through a wormhole.

what in the actual fuck

Well, that actually makes more sense then "relativity is wrong lol".

mmh... this is not gonna be settled soon, I am afraid.

There's really two ways it could go. If the results of the experiment are replicated, which should happen within the next few years, then it will change theoretical physcis. If, more likely, they're not replicated, then it was probably some kind of experimental error and everyone will forget about it as fast as they did "cold fusion".

[Yosarian2]

If this were tachyons, that would make way more sense. Tachyons are at least theoretically possible.

[Yosarian2]

huh, drench, I think you are not getting it completely right. tachyons are not particles, but something closer to a challenge to the model. Indeed, the CERN result can now be spelled as follows: there might be tachyonic neutrinos.

No, no no.

A tachyon is a hypothetical particle that can ONLY go faster then light. If it were ever to go slower then light, it would have a negative mass, but of course it can't. Basically it's a particle that's stuck on the other side of the light barrier. A particle with positive rest mass can only go slower then light, a particle with zero rest mass (IE: a photon) can only go at the speed of light (photon has a certain amount of mass/energy, but only because it is in motion at the speed of light), and a particle with negative rest mass can only go faster then light.

It's something that's theoretically possible under Einstein physcis, and that's where the idea comes from in fact, but has never actually been observed.

A neutrino can't be a tachyon, though. Neutrinos have mass.

[Yosarian2]

You know that something weird is going on when the web version of the New York Times news article about a possible scientific discovery has a hyperlink in it to...xkcd. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/scien ... 1&ref=cern

[Yosarian2]

1. The statement of restrained relativity "Nothing travels faster than light" is false. The true statement is "No information travels faster than light".

You are aware that the second statement includes the first, right?

By the way, that is not quite true; there are some things in quantum physcis that happen instantly at great distances ("spooky action at a distance" to quote Einsten), like the collapsing of the wave-form of one particle when a different particle is observed, but they can not be used to carry information.

[Yosarian2]

Yeah, I'd give wormholes about 100 times the odds of FTL neutrinos, and measurement error about 500 times the chance of wormholes. We've

measured

the effects of relativity, and there's no reason to believe anything can violate the infinite mass/energy limit.

I'd give measurement error at least 1000000 times the odds of wormholes.

We've seen stars go supernova that were expected to go supernova. If neutrinos were faster than light or doing wormhole travel, the neutrino burst from a supernova would have beaten the light from a supernova to earth by an easily measurable factor. (Like minutes or hours or days or years.)

Is the claim that all neutrinos travel faster then light, or one specific type does, or the neutrinos created in a certain place were, or what? What was this experiment measuring, exactly? I'm still kind of fuzzy on the details.

[Yosarian2]

I beg to differ, travel time from Paris to Rome could be reduced by at least 10 nanoseconds
think of the commercial value!

People are already making money out of nanoseconds.
http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2011/06 ... econd-age/

That's a brilliant idea, sl. So all we have to do is make a ftl-neutrino communication device, hook it up to a computer capable of buying and selling stocks in a few nanoseconds, and we can buy and sell stocks right before they go up or down.

Does time travel count as insider trading?

[Yosarian2]

Ahh. The fact that two things that are simultanious in one frame of reference are not simutanious in another, right. Interesting. I remember a physcis problem like that in college.

("Guy has a 10 foot ladder he wants to put in an 8 foot long barn. So his solution is he's going to run REALLY fast, accelerating the ladder until nearly the speed of light so that it become shorter, so that to a stationary observer, it looks like the ladder is only 7 feet long at the moment the ladder enters the barn. So there should be at least a split second where the ladder is in the barn, right? But the problem is, from the point of view of the guy running WITH the ladder, the ladder is still 10 feet long and the BARN actually looks shorter. So how does this work?"

The answer is that simultaneity itself breaks down at relativistic speeds. From the point of view of the stationary observer, the back of the ladder enters the barn before the front of the ladder breaks through the back wall, so the ladder is totally inside the barn briefly; but from the point of view of the guy running with the ladder, the front of the ladder actually breaks through the back wall of the barn before the back of the ladder is in the barn, so from his point of view, the ladder is never totally in the barn. Both points of view are equally correct and valid; if there was ever a point in time where the whole ladder was inside the barn depends totally on your frame of reference. Two things that happen at the same time in one frame of reference don't in a different one.)

[Yosarian2]

except someone in the comments section said the assumption about the way the clocks were synchronized is incorrect

(nods) Yeah, it would be kind of an elementary mistake for a lab of physicists to make. I donno, we'll see.