This came up on the news feed and it's been all over the TV.
Scientists are baffled by experiments that appear to show subatomic particles known as neutrinos have exceeded the speed of light.
Read More (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484)
On the TV they said that it's more likely to be a fault in the instruments that are measuring its speed rather than the particles travelling faster than light, but the jury is still out.
Hehe, I posted this earlier on Dreams, interesting story.
Oops!
Yeah interesting, with some profound consequences if proved to be correct.
I wonder what Snowy thinks about it.
I've just spent a little time reading up on this, if proven, this could have a profound effect on everything we think we know, with particular profanity toward Time Travel.
To travel anywhere you need a destination, otherwise you haven't moved, so to travel back in time would mean that history was still running in real time, ergo, the same with the future. Turning up unannounced would clearly have an effect thus, essentially, changing the accepted time line. Result, now would be altered.
Stuff of Science Fiction, maybe, but have we been visited from someone from the future, if so, then maybe I never wrote this. :scratch-head:
Actually, all we need is a Snowcrash, ;D to sort this all out and explain what's going on
Some say that if everything is known about the universe it will instantly be replaced by something even more inexplicable.
Others say this has already happened.
(DNA)
:P
This is an effect of less than 1/10,000th so no time travel yet I feel.
It always confuses me how they can measure something like that to such a degree of accuracy, considering that it's not a "round trip" measurement (where the "signal", in this case neutrinos, would be reflected back to the point of origin). I'm sure that local time variations are taken into account, but there's still the propagation delay of the sensors, and all sorts of other variations that can affect the timing of the measurements, causing discrepancies of this sort.
And no, Data (or was it Art?), if you throw a lit torch, the light does NOT speed up. It only changes frequencies, relative to you. (It must have been Art. I'm almost sure of it now)
Yeah that light thing is what I thought too... it's all relative. I think a bit like a fly (insect) in an aeroplane, isn't that the same kind of thing ?
Also, if my car is going at the speed of light in the middle of the night and I turn the headlights on would I see anything ?
...apart from the police...
Well, I'm obviously no physicist, but the way I understand it, the closer you get to the speed of light ( the 'C' in the famous equation E=MC2), the more energy ('E') you gain, based on your mass ('M'). Photons, according to physics, have no mass(?), so there's not all that much energy involved (relatively speaking). If you were able to get your car up to the speed of light, I honestly think that seeing a cop at that point would be the least of your worries. :P Whatever light that came from the headlights would be reflected back to your eyes as something along the lines of what you get from a GRB (Gamma Ray burst), or even higher energy levels, perhaps. I just don't have the math to express it.
Close Dave. Very close.
Anything with mass, as it approaches C, gains more mass. Mass and energy being equivalent (E=MC²), the system has more energy. The more mass something has the more energy it takes to make it go faster still. The faster it goes the more mass it attains.
To send anything with mass at C requires infinite energy (that C² conversion factor is a bitch). So, anything with mass CANNOT go at the speed of light. Space has no mass and can expand faster than light.
Neutrinos are weird. Gravity (mass) does not affect them or very little. There are approx 65,000,000,000 of the little things passing through every square centimeter, every second. These come from our sun and pass straight through the whole Earth. To say they are hard to detect is a massive understatement.
It is thought that a neutrino does have a very small amount of mass, though this has not been prooven. I'm betting that the latest news story will turn out to be a timing error. 1 part in 40,000. Neutrino wiki here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino#Solar).
As for light. No matter what speed you are doing, light will always appear to go at the speed of light. The torch (flashlight) you are holding will always appear the same colour to you. To someone travelling at a different speed to you, the light will appear a different colour (red shifted if moving away, blue if toward) and you will not agree on when the torch was switched on. C does not change, space and time do.
Did some maths and revised timing error to 1 part in 40,000.
And here's a good cartoon picturing my thoughts. Shame I didn't think of it.
http://www.xkcd.com/955/ (http://www.xkcd.com/955/)
Quote from: Freddy on September 24, 2011, 21:09:30 PM
Also, if my car is going at the speed of light in the middle of the night and I turn the headlights on would I see anything ?
I'm assuming you are in a space car. Simple answer to 'would you see anything?' is no. Mainly due to being in space there would be nothing for your headlights to reflect off of. I'm not sure 'in the middle of the night' has any relevance.
Would your headlights light up as normal? Yes.
Could your car go at, or close to, the speed of light in atmosphere? No, you would burn up through friction. Not to mention doing over 7 orbits of Earth per second.
The space police would be the least of your worries. Breathing would be priority number 1.
Quote from: Snowcrash on September 25, 2011, 21:19:38 PM
And here's a good cartoon picturing my thoughts. Shame I didn't think of it.
http://www.xkcd.com/955/ (http://www.xkcd.com/955/)
I want you to know, Snowy, that your post was single-handedly responsible for sucking more than 2 hours from my life. :P Those comics are
awesome! Of course, that places me squarely in the "geek" category, since I both "get", and enjoy, science/math humor. :) 200 comics down, 750~something to go.
Wow.
You've read far more than me.
I do like the circuit diagram though.
The latest from the Bad Astro blogger on this subject.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/10/15/followup-ftl-neutrinos-explained-not-so-fast-folks/ (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/10/15/followup-ftl-neutrinos-explained-not-so-fast-folks/)
Nice program on BBC last night explaining about this and what it could mean. Now on iPlayer. Presented by Marcus du Sautoy....
BBC iPlayer - Faster Than the Speed of Light? (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b016bys2/)
Just watched the faster than light speed video, all the ifs and buts and maybes, I want to know the answer now ;D
Still a good program that gets you thinking, thanks for posting Freddy.
You are welcome. I like Marcus du Sautoy, he did an interesting program with Alan Davies (the comedian) a while back themed around 'how long is a piece of string' - a lot more complicated than you think. They also went into string theory which was very interesting. *He also did a program on parallel dimensions too, all very interesting and well explained*.
The BBC was quick to put this one together I thought.
*My mistake, I think that was Brian Cox.
What an interesting programme, as Data said, no answers really. It seems to me that the Scientific/Physics academia really wish that this would go away, or, indeed, had not been made public, as it interferes with their cosy life.
For the past ninety odd years an accepted standard has been used and is the bases for many investigative projects, funded in the usual way. These finding could throw a serious spanner in the works essentially making the findings of these projects, factual or otherwise, incorrect.
Is it possible that there are particles that, due to inadequate detection equipment, travel faster than light and have not yet been detected ?. Currently, who knows.
To me, in my simplistic world, this smacks again of man's arrogance, we make the rules and they can't be broken.
I think, as a race, we are in for some pretty serious wake-up calls in the future as we are not as clever as we think we are.
BTW academia, best of luck with your next funding application. :-X
Yes, it's kind of like when they say something like 'this dinosaur was the largest thing to have ever lived' and then they forget to add '...that has so far been discovered'.
Our trouble I agree is that once we think we know something then it has to be right. Not so.
Anyway, I will have to watch that again...did I understand correctly that mathematics does actually allow for things that travel faster than the speed of light ?
Physics, as we understand it now, does not allow anything sub-light, with mass, to travel at or above the speed of light.
Anything travelling at the speed of light (like light) is detectable and is the basis of all our technology to this point.
If there was anything travelling faster than light (tachyons, very tachy :D ) it would be very difficult for us to detect due to we use light to detect things.
If a particle is created travelling faster than light (this appears to be allowed) it would not be able to slow down below the speed of light. Though the book is still out on this one.
An anti electron (positron) is mathamatically identical to a regular electron travelling backwards through time. But what is really real?
With respect to physics, everything not forbidden is compulsory. (Gell-Mann borrowed from T.H. White)
After a flurry of papers the team at Gran Sasso are going to re-do the experiment in a different way to see if they're right or not.
Watch this space.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15471118 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15471118)
This is still rumour but it looks like the timing could be down to a dodgy fibre optic cable.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/02/22/unconfirmed-rumor-ftl-neutrinos-may-be-due-to-a-faulty-gps-connection/ (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/02/22/unconfirmed-rumor-ftl-neutrinos-may-be-due-to-a-faulty-gps-connection/)
Will keep looking.
It a conspiricy I tells ya, them that's in the know don't want to share ::)
I always wondered why the speed of light was limited, I learned the speed of light is specified as being whatever was measured in a vacum. When Light hits the earths atmosphere it slows down. Light travels at different speeds in air than it would in glass or clear plastics which is why prisms and lens work.
Interesting find.
Carl2
I feel this neutrino story is now put to bed with a whimper.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17364682 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17364682)
It seems the cosmic speed limit still stands, for now.
I'd imagine that the poor bastage who's job it was to maintain the equipment that caused all this furor back in September has either died of embarrassment, or is looking for a new career. I also think that whoever decided to publish the original findings probably feels pretty stupid by now, too. :)