Is this to science what no god would be to religion?

I'd laugh for a week if it turned out to be something basic like the GPS giving the surface distance (i.e. including Earth's curvature) while the neutrinos travel in a straight A-B line (i.e. ignoring Earth's curvature). I'm sure a mistake like that would yield an error greater than 60 billionths of a second, but if it's that then I'm going to apply for a job!
 
If light can travel at 20mph at near absolute zero (apparently); and is thought to have moved faster at the beginning of time with higher density and heat (I also saw something sayingthat light is travelling faster below the southern pole and slower above the north pole, suggesting that it could be slowing down as it travels); why should it now have a set speed limit which everything else (even things we may have no idea exist) have to adhere too.
Doesn't the above suggest that light can have a limit depending on its environment. Why couldn't it be the same for other particles; especially for those where it seems there is very little knowledge on them other than what graphs and equations can say.
There has been talk of Tachyon energy/particles for some time. Perhaps these seemingly ludicrous theories could actually hold some water.

A speed limit bothers me. Something tells me that putting an absolute limit on the speed of light and making that a maximum for everything is really limiting the direction physics can go in :Smile3:
But then again I haven't even attempted to study the equations telling us why light is maximum; so I don't really have much basis to start spouting my uneducated opinions other than it interests me :p

I'm no physicist; but if something like this means that the rules have to be re-written or modified, then surely that is a start into correcting the model we have so far and potentially push our knowledge, understanding and use of these findings to a new level.
 
Squagnut said:
I'd laugh for a week if it turned out to be something basic like the GPS giving the surface distance (i.e. including Earth's curvature) while the neutrinos travel in a straight A-B line (i.e. ignoring Earth's curvature). I'm sure a mistake like that would yield an error greater than 60 billionths of a second, but if it's that then I'm going to apply for a job!
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Well they quote a difference of some 5996 km per second faster than light speed measured over a distance of 732km. Im far too not clever enough to work out the math but I am sure you are Phil.

_55556200_cern_624_v2.jpg
 
Lord Lucan said:
Well they quote a difference of some 5996 km per second faster than light speed measured over a distance of 732km. Im far too not clever enough to work out the math but I am sure you are Phil.

_55556200_cern_624_v2.jpg
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It's not that hard, but I cba right now. The top photo of the 3 in that image illustrates perfectly what I'm on about - my idea is that the orange dotted line is the path the neutrinos take, while the Earth's curve slightly above it is the distance the GPS measures. I'm very very probably wrong (I would imagine that they obtain the CERN/Gran Sasso locations using very precise GPS measurements and use their own software to calculate the distance. They'd have to take into account differences in altitude and so on, and if I can think of this stuff then a proper boffin can), but I haven't looked into what's been said, tho' I heard on the radio that the boffins have the distance accurate to within 20cm.

It could well be a problem with calibration of the clocks (very hard to get right, and as I understand it, a significant difference in altitude could affect this by means of Einstein's principle of equivalence), but whatever it is, it's more likely to be some kind of human error than neutrinos travelling faster than light, tho' I'm the first to admit that this would be a bit exciting.
 
Milky said:
A speed limit bothers me. Something tells me that putting an absolute limit on the speed of light and making that a maximum for everything is really limiting the direction physics can go in :Smile3:
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You have to bear in mind that ever since Einstein came up with his braindump on the matter nothing, and I mean nothing, has ever contradicted the notion that the speed of light is an absolute maximum. There's a lot of empirical evidence of such a thing.

The speed of light depends on the medium. Let me rephrase that: the speed at which photons, or light radiation, move depend on the medium. The "speed of light" is just an everyday name for C on those equations - just happens to be the speed light moves at when on a complete vacuum.
 
The fact that the light has a very high but finite speed was first observed some 300 years before einstein though thought to be some 40,000 miles/sec slower. If light travelled with infinite speed we should be observing some eclipses (jupiter's moons for example) at regular intervals at exactly the time they happened, which is not obviously the case.
 
Squagnut said:
The current excitement is about neutrinos, not neutrons. Despite what Tesla said, neutrons do not exceed the speed of light, and have way more mass than neutrinos. Wolfgang Pauli first postulated the existence of neutrinos in 1930, but they weren't observed until 1956.
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Yes, that's right, but if you have a look at the page that I linked above the image then you will see that by neutrons Tesla meant any particle with zero charge.
 
in the end of the day it is likely that the speed of light, or to be more precise the cosmic speed constant "C", hasn't been broken by those neutrinos, and it will turn out either that there was a flaw somewhere in the measurement or in the experiment itself, which again wasn't aimed at investigating this event, or that those neutrinos have gone through a shortcut of some kind, perhaps an extra dimensional one where quantum science is more involved than relativity... and this will still prove Einstein was right... Or... it is a god's joke to foul us all :Wink3:
 
oooh.. an off topic fresh news just for a laugh (albeit a sad one).... the italian Secretary of State for Education, Miss Gelmini, issued a statement on the ministerial website where she plaudes the authors of the historical experiment. In the ministerial statement she points out that Italy invested 45 million euros to build the tunnel between CERN and the Gran Sasso lab, through which the experiment took place.... She, well... her team for her, actually thought that there is a 730 Kms tunnel between Geneva and the Gran Sasso mountain, inventing the 45m euro public finance for a rather imaginary tunnel that doesn't exist... :confused:
 
http://www.newscientist.com/article...may-allow-neutrinos-to-cheat-light-speed.html

they were discussing this in the New Scientist this week, dimension hops? different types of neutrinos? or a fuzzy departure
(they know when the neutrinos arrive but it's harder to detect when they leave)
there are observations that contradict the CERN findings:
One problem is that the CERN result busts the apparent speed limit of neutrinos seen when radiation from a supernova explosion reached Earth in February 1987.
Supernovae are exploding stars that are so bright they can briefly outshine their host galaxies. However, most of their energy actually streams out as neutrinos. Because neutrinos scarcely interact with matter, they should escape an exploding star almost immediately, while photons of light will take about 3 hours to get out. And in 1987, trillions of neutrinos arrived 3 hours before the dying star's light caught up, just as physicists would have expected.
The recent claim of a much higher neutrino speed just doesn't fit with this earlier measurement. "If neutrinos were that much faster than light, they would have arrived [from the supernova] five years sooner, which is crazy," says Sher. "They didn't. The supernova contradicts this [new finding] by huge factors."
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Sher also mentions a third option: that the measurement is correct. Some theories posit that there are extra, hidden dimensions beyond the familiar four (three of space, one of time). It's possible that the speedy neutrinos tunnel through these extra dimensions, reducing the distance they have to travel to get to the target. This would explain the measurement without requiring the speed of light to be broken.
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I like the idea of the neutrinos going through another dimension to get there quicker :Grin:
but it could be something more mundane :Smile3:
 
Yeah my friend who is doing a physics phd and has just been at CERN for 1.5 years is really excited about all this.. he said that they are looking at explanations such as time travel/multiple dimensions (as well as more boring stuff I'm assuming). I didnt speak to him in lots of detail about it but he is coming to elixir of life on sat so maybe then! Though I probably wouldnt understand it.
 
lol, I think it's exciting even if my understanding is limited - I have a friend at CERN too :Smile3:
I'm more into biology & chemistry, the maths involved in Physics at that level is mind boggling to me, it's another kind of thinking - but I find the idea of another dimension fascinating :Smile3:

(my little boy is really getting into physics though........I can see awkward questions ahead! :laugh: help! hahaha)
 
badger said:
lol, I think it's exciting even if my understanding is limited - I have a friend at CERN too :Smile3:
I'm more into biology & chemistry, the maths involved in Physics at that level is mind boggling to me, it's another kind of thinking - but I find the idea of another dimension fascinating :Smile3:

(my little boy is really getting into physics though........I can see awkward questions ahead! :laugh: help! hahaha)
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the maths involved in ecology is pretty headbusting aswell
 
hehe well it's statistics mostly, there were formulae in chemistry, but I could never get my head around the advanced maths in physics :Smile3:although we did have to do some climate modelling, that was an experience :confused:

some of the maths in physics makes sense when it's explained, but I couldn't go about working something new out. Although I was quite envious at uni that all the maths and physics students seemed to have much less reading and writing to do, they made it look so simple :Smile3: Some people just have that kind of mind, amazing what you can express purely in maths without many words though
 
from my experience 'predator-prey' models can get quickly out of hand aswell
 
lol :Smile3: I didn't mind those so much, there were better ways to spend an evening though, I have to admit hehehe

eesh, just reminded me of the marine biology stuff, fisheries :spaced: that was a headache.....hmmm and calculating the dissolved inorganic carbon in the ocean stuff, it all gets quickly out of hand :laugh:
 
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