To infinity and beyond!?

madpeople · Post by **madpeople** » Thu Sep 22, 2011 6:25 pm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484

Figured this might be important, it's not every day people go about breaking the law* [of physics], about not going faster than c.

*law which presumably will have to be revised if it is true that neutrinos go faster than c...

Hopefully this can be put to good use in communication to shave off a few hundred nanoseconds of lag in internet games

DonKarnage · Post by **DonKarnage** » Thu Sep 22, 2011 8:46 pm

As long as you don't mind having some really REALLY bad packet loss

MrChaos · Post by **MrChaos** » Thu Sep 22, 2011 11:07 pm

meeps

particles that go faster then light has been around for decades... they have even been part of the plot of gents like Fredrik Pohl's Starburst iirc.

I think the part they/you/I are excited about is it appears particles that exist as sublight can cross the lightspeed barrier, THAT is a new one afaik

edit: obviously I don't know the standing of the idea amongst the phyists gen pop but Ive always been of the impression that it was a well regarded theory.

Memory trigger: My teacher in HS was in the Air Force for a number of decades and told us a story about NASA, he did something

with them, having problems syncing data and the issue appeared to be some of the stuff they were observing was go FTL. This was during the mercury/Geminii/Apollo era and I almost certainly have the details fubared.

Makida · Post by **Makida** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 12:20 am

IIRC, until now the idea of particles that travel faster than light was purely theoretical. IIRC there was the idea that participles that constantly travel faster than c, without having to ever accelerate over it, would be possible, but it was just a thought experiment. Relativity still said that you can't send information faster than light, because if you could, it'd violate causality -- basically, you can send messages into the past (from some frame of reference) and cause paradoxes and what-not, like sending a message into the past that prevents the very message itself from being sent. But if - if - the facts in this article turn out to be accurate, it'd seem like the people at CERN basically already have the equipment to do precisely that, in theory if not in practice. If this pans out it will be the biggest revolution in physics since Einstein himself.

Which is why we should wait to see if it pans out at all.

Extraordinary claims, etc., as these scientists themselves seem to be aware better than anyone.

I'm going back to oblivion now. This message sent to you from five seconds in the future.

Adaven · Post by **Adaven** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 3:10 am

Hmmm.... very interesting. The very reason we can see neutrino's in the first place is because in the ultra rare cases that they do collide with something, the remnant particles will briefly travel faster than light, creating a blue flash that can be detected. However, in those cases it was only because the particles were travelling faster than light in a medium, not the speed of light in a vacuum - the real hard limit.

The article wasn't very clear on that, but I'm guessing that by the scientist's being surprised they are indeed thinking the things are going faster than light in a vacuum, which would be indeed revolutionary. Thanks for the link.

Right before I dropped out of grad school physics, I remember a lecture from my particles professor saying that antimatter would be indistinguishable from regular matter going backwards in time...

Malicious Wraith · Post by **Malicious Wraith** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 5:37 am

Even so, 60 nanoseconds with a reported MOE of 10 nanoseconds is somewhat suspect. To put that in perspective, you need to understand that the laboratory the neutrinos were sent too was 732km away. It arrived as if it were 731.984km's away.

With a margin of error of approximately 3 meters... it arrived as if it were 16 meters closer if it were to be traveling at the proper speed of light.

That is 16 meters on a total path that is 732,000 meters.

It is possible that this difference is not a result of any object traveling faster than the speed of light, but rather a displacement of the neutrino during the transitive phase from muon to tau.

I am sure we will find out in a couple of years.

MrChaos · Post by **MrChaos** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 6:45 am

FTL particles the idea and equations go exist but can't go slower then c... you know speed of light in a vacuum tachyons for example have been a staple of SF for decades. Starburst just did a really good job of describing what happens around c and the theories for the rubes like us is all.

If they obtained a true vacuum over such a distance... THAT alone is one hell of an achievement.

edited out my other thoughts which was akin to farting in the wind

Post by **Raveen** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 7:24 am

What happens to mass and length if you're a superluminal particle?

LANS · Post by **LANS** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 12:38 pm

http://io9.com/5843112/faster-than-light-n...nos-not-so-fast

QUOTE Now consider a supernova explosion. In particular, consider Supernova 1987A:

This was an explosion about 160,000 light years from earth. The thing is, the neutrinos and the photons from the explosion reached us at almost exactly the same time. In the cause of intellectual honestly, I need to point out that the neutrinos were detected first, by about 3 hours, but this is because the envelope of the explosion was optically thick and the photons had to bounce around a while, while the neutrinos just streamed right out.

But how much of a delay between neutrinos and photons would we expect if the OPERA result applied?

2*10^(-5) * 160000 years = 3.2 years

In other words, if the effect really were this large, we would have seen the neutrinos from SN 1987A way back in 1984. Yeah, we would have noticed that.

I don't want to be too glib, however. There are a couple of key differences: The neutrinos detected from 1987A were electron (anti-)neutrinos, not tau neutrinos. However, since neutrinos oscillate from one flavor to another, I'd be surprised if this was the key difference. The energies are quite different. In 1987A, neutrino energies were typically a few 10′s of MeV. The neutrinos measured by OPERA are a factor of 100 higher. It could very well be that this is a sensitive function of energy.[/quote]

Post by **BackTrak** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 5:53 pm

MrChaos wrote:QUOTE (MrChaos @ Sep 23 2011, 01:45 AM) FTL particles the idea and equations go exist but can't go slower then c...

@FTW particles, on the other hand are composed entirely of Yanlin. And they go what ever speed they damn well feel like.