Attached Link: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-09-physicists-wary-junking-limit.html

This week has been most fascinating in the world of physics. It appears a team at CERN has detected a neutrino particle that travels faster than the speed of light. Something that up to this moment has been considered a physical impossibility as set down by the Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. There seems to be some question as to the neutrino’s ability to do so via other dimensions. What do you guys think of this?

Perhaps it is zipping in and out of another dimension and that's how the Neutrino get its ability to travel faster than light..  If so,  learning to use other dimensions to travel great distances, other stars systems will be at our reach..

The present benefits will go to Data transmissions and computers..

According to Radio 4, there are question marks over the aomic clock alignment.

Yeah Airflamesred, even the CERN team is asking for other scientists around the world to try and replicate the experiment because they too are disbelieving this outcome. But so far from what I understand no one has come across a glitch.

Yes, Tom271, from the primary report I read earlier this week that is exactly what they are saying it could be which would then tie it to string theory which is still only a mathematical theory in itself.

@Quest
Glad you mention String theory because my pet theory is that everything in our universe is a spillover from another dimension...  or other dimensions... 

And maybe we exchange "stuff" with those dimension as well.. ie,, "Black holes"

Ah yes, string theory (or “M” theory as some like to call it) with membranes undulating in time/space each representing its own universe or dimension and when these undulations hit together from different branes (short for membranes) some believe causes another big bang and an alternate universe creation in another brane. Whereas some say that when they hit, we get black holes on the one side and white holes on the other with spillage in between creating wormholes. Fascinating and heady stuff to be sure. Imagine them proving both these theories (speed of light and string theory) at the same time in our lifetimes. One being the direct result from the other.

hmmm...a bit out of my field but educational...great thread . .. ...

Attached Link: More info here

I could go on to say I typed this response before Quest posted the thread but that would be a stretch unless I actually reside in a companion universe that is two days ahead of this one.  But that would be a lie.

Attached Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/science/24speed.html

From a New York Times article posted 11 hours ago. They still don't know what's going on.       

Hay Skiwillgee welcome to my universe.

Hang on, hang on.  Now I heard about this a few days ago, we had it on the news, but I've just been thinking. It took them how long to build Cern, and to create and install the LHC?  And then to fix the problem with the LHC?

(did I hear someone dropped a sandwich in the works?)

and now they are asking for someone else to check their results?.... how long exactly will we have to wait while someone (who might, or might not) build a 2nd LHC, and drill another how many miles of tunnel (the distance from Cern to that other lab in Italy) so that someone else can duplicate the results (and presumably check the presence of a 2nd sandwich???)?

ROFL!

Okay, sorry, but it just sounded a bit weird.  Hopefully they just mean "check my workings out" and not "re-do the experiment."

All joking aside, I do hope it gets cleared up soon, so we can be properly joyful that super duper faster than light neutrinos do actually exist.

It would be terribly depressing to wait and wait, and then to find out that it was a wibble in a clock.

Maybe it's the clock that's going faster than light?

Hey, if it is a superfast neutrino - what are they going to call it?

How about calling it : A Wibble?

Or is it actually a Higgs Boson?  A God Particle?  Fun stuff, anyway.

So long as it doesn't turn out that we are living in 'Interesting Times'..... (ancient chinese curse)

(quote Quest) -- They still don't know what's going on.

(quote Fran) -- It took them how long to build Cern, and to create and install the LHC?  And then to fix the problem with the LHC?

Sigh..... I know exactly what's going on there and why they got such weird results at Cern:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2250388 

;)
Hubert

Two things are faster than light.

#1 The succession to the throne of Great Britain. If/when the Queen dies Charles becomes King. There is no waiting time.

#2 How do you think I get here from Mars?

Seriously, and not to make light of this possible discovery, how likely is it that Einstein got it wrong? He came up with his ideas over a century ago. We couldn't fly. We had no computers. We had no television. We hadn't spilt the atom.

Nothing can travel faster than light, until we find something that does.

Bryster,

Oh yes, exactly! If a theory is falsifiable, then it is scientific. and the principle of falsifiability is what makes science open doors, and that's exciting.

You can't say "nothing is faster than light" because one day something might turn up that IS!

So he didn't 'get it wrong' exactly, he just hadn't (and may yet not have been) proved wrong.  He was certainly not averse to proving himself wrong if the occasion demanded it.

He would have been more correct to say that nothing had (as yet) been observed to be faster than light.

I wonder how long it will take to check these results???  I'm on tenterhooks here!

Quote - > (quote Quest) -- They still don't know what's going on.

(quote Fran) -- It took them how long to build Cern, and to create and install the LHC?  And then to fix the problem with the LHC?

Sigh..... I know exactly what's going on there and why they got such weird results at Cern:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2250388 

;)
Hubert

Hey!  You cut off the white hole dump - I wanted to see that one, it isn't the same as the black hole dump is it? It would have to be different... inverted perhaps?

I wanna see it!!!

ROFL!

ROFLMAO@FranOnTheEdge! Oh, that’s funny stuff Fran, I hadn’t heard about the sandwich incident. Maybe the Neutrino is actually a wild flying piece of ground pepper left over from that sandwich that got caught up in the accelerator’s world wind electromagnetic field? But in seriousness, I think what they’re asking other scientists to do is to come to CERN and repeat the experiment or maybe the experiment itself can be run in other particle accelerators and it doesn’t have to be at CERN.

@Hubert, wonderfully satiric and delightfully whimsical image.  Love that it has a “White hole Dump” and “Black hole Dump”. Go Woody Go!

Hi Fran, Quest, TheBryster, (adressed in alphabetic order)

Hey!  You cut off the white hole dump - I wanted to see that one, it isn't the same
as the black hole dump is it? It would have to be different... inverted perhaps?
Good guess! Yep, it actually is inverted, its funnel ouside-upwards and with grid-lines in pure white.

I wanna see it!!!
Well, I actually had that detail/mesh in the scene during an intermediate development stage! But removed it because it obstructed the details behind it too much (esp. that nicely glowing black hole dump).

PS "FTL":
I am eyewitness of true FTL-objects, here at Rosity, really!!! .... being the members fleeing from viewing my mugshot in the Gallery! ;)

;)
Hubert

Quest, that link will not let me go back to it.  Says, "I need to log on to an account".  Anyway I was going to second read it to verify it mentioned the team studied the results for quite a while trying to account for the readings. (did article say 6 months?). If that is the case, I give them high credit for trying to disprove their own readings and turning over to the scientific community.  I imagine it will not be another 6 months before the experiment is repeated.

Bryster said "how likely is it that Einstein got it wrong?"

I think Einstein's theory is confined to this universe and did not explore the possibilities of different physical rules beyond that.  The speed of light may be the limit within this dimension.

String theory has been pretty much dropped by mainstream science.  That theory needed to introduce more and more dimensions trying to fill in the unexplainable blanks in its math. Right?

@Skiwillgee, yeah, you’re right…I just tried it getting the same results. Hay, you may have to go back to your other universe and try re-linking…LOL. Here’s another link to the same article but you’ll only get one shot because it too will ask you to register so you may want to copy it temporarily to Word for a re-read:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/science/24speed.html?_r=1&ref=science

This is the passage in the article you’re referring to:

“Dr. Autiero said his group had spent six months trying to explain away the result, but could not do it. Given the stakes for physics, he said, it would not be proper to attempt any sort of theoretical interpretation of the results. “We present to you this discrepancy or anomaly today,” he said.”

Yes, indeed Skiwillgee, credit must be given for the sake of scientific verifiability.

String theory needed 11 dimensions to satisfy the mathematical equations which would make whole the theory of everything. But as theories go it too is open to interpretation and verification.

You may find this article of interest but it doesn’t totally disprove string theory.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-12/no-black-holes-formed-lhc-physicists-report

On the other hand we may still be able to book a 5 day workshop on the theory:

http://www.birs.ca/events/2011/5-day-workshops/11w5090

But we must hurry we only have until Dec. 4th to make the arrangements.

I heard this story as well and I was thinking how do they know its the same neutrinos arriving on the other side, do they paint them red and blue? ;)

If the findings are true it may lead to time travel some day :)

Attached Link: And yet another article

@Quest

LOL at the invite to a workshop.  I would need 10 years at MIT before even hoping to learn the language these guys speak.  I don't have the money or brain power to get into MIT either.  I'll stick with reading a few books like the idiot's guides to quantum and string theory for the mass's. 

I only speculate via intuition.

Hay Skiwillgee, you need an MIT degree I'll send you one. You gotta be quick tho, they're going fast...LOL. The whole physics community is in an uproar over this and there’s lots of popping off starting to permeate through the media about it. I’m sure this will come to some sort of resolution soon enougth. I just love the range of possibilities.

Quest, I don't need a degree, I need the real knowledge and understanding.

Quote from the New Scientist article I linked my last posting.

"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." " [emphasis by skiwillgee]***

This pretty much explains that CERN experiment observed an entirely different phenomenom or it is a measurement error.

Details...details...     I want my transporter!!

@ Skiwillgee, LOL…well, I’ll take a look around and see if I have a box of knowledge laying around somewhere but the degree would be cheaper. Yes, I’ve read about the supernova and several other opposing experiments concerning neutrinos with similar outcomes. Makes it seem like the deck is fully stacked against the CERN experiment. But the CERN team is just as befuddled about the whole thing to the point where they’re reaching out to other scientists. I tell you, this must be very rough on those folks because they’re putting their professional reputations and careers on the line as trained, qualified scientists. With all due respect to them I must bestow them with the benefit of the doubt until they are proven otherwise. In my opinion what we are seeing now unfortunately, is the start of a media feeding frenzy and people coming out of the woodwork wanting to get their 15 minutes of fame. But I must say, I haven’t seen this much excitement over a physics experiment in who knows how long.

@ Tom271, I’ve got my flux capacitor buffed up shiny and ready to go.

They are also looking at the possibility that these neutrinos transmitted at CERN are of a different type..  Once the community gets to repeat the experiment we'll see some feedback..  The media might be doing some good for science in this case..  It's good to see so many people involved.. very exiting times...

My favourite book on the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_Zero

Attached Link: http://www.thesimmonsvoice.com/health-science/neutrinos-prove-einstein-wrong-1.2617466

“…the Fermilab accelerator complex in Chicago is now gearing up to duplicate the results. As it turns out, the Fermilab also made the claim of faster-than-light neutrinos in 2007 but was proven false after a closer look.

Although many physicists are skeptical, it certainly wouldn't be the first time a far-fetched idea ended up being true. It wasn't that long ago that scientists laughed at the idea of dark matter, which is now a fundamental part physicists' understanding of time.”

Perhaps physicists should address the question of why light has a finite speed ?

And while they are at it invent a beer that won't go flat !  

Cheers! Jed. 

I think it's very laudable that in this case they are going out of their way to let others varify their results.

I've got a serious question... If neutrinos do prove to travel faster than C (the speed of light), will this not throw nearly all theory of astrophysics out the window since so much of it has been based on math by Einstein?  Things like big bang and such will be suspect. And how will that reconcil with observed events such as the supernova in 1987 where neutrino burst arrived at Earth exactly as expected ahead of light?  I am becoming more convinced the results of the experiment were not a result of the speed of single particles in this dimension. (I make a pretty good arm chair quarterback, no?)

Maybe Neutrinos behave like all particles do except under certain circumstances that the CERN experiment provided unconventionally and inadvertently..  Just to know a particle can travel in and out of dimensions and gain not speed but space time advantage over a particle traveling in 4th dimension only is fascinating to me..

Attached Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light

@ Jedswindells, They have questioned this for centuries:

“The speed at which light waves (or any wave for that matter) propagate in a vacuum (or otherwise) is independent both of the motion of the wave source and of the inertial frame of reference of the observer. This invariance of the speed of light was postulated by Einstein in 1905, after being motivated by Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism and the lack of evidence for the luminiferous ether; it has since been consistently confirmed by many experiments. The special theory of relativity explores the consequences of this invariance of c with the assumption that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames of reference.One consequence is that c is the speed at which all massless particles and waves, including light, must travel in a vacuum.”

I wholeheartedly agree with your theory of Beer…cheers!

@ Skiwillgee, that’s what all the hoopla is about. Here are 10 theories that would be affected if this faster than light neutrino experiment turns out to be proven right:

http://www.livescience.com/16214-implications-faster-light-neutrinos.html

@ Tom271, Oh, I agree that would be mind blowing indeed.

Attached Link: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21093-fasterthanlight-neutrino-result-to-get-extra-checks.html

According to New Science article new experiments are being performed to solidify or nullify the results originally reported by the team who authored the experiment.

"...Some OPERA team members have reservations too. Fifteen of the 160-strong collaboration did not sign their names to the preprint of the paper because they considered the results too preliminary.

"I didn't sign because I thought the estimated error was not correct," says OPERA team member Luca Stanco of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy, adding he thinks it is larger than the stated 10 nanoseconds.

Now it appears that the cautious voices have won out. The collaboration has begun a new set of measurements to be completed before submitting the paper to a peer-reviewed journal.

The team is sending tighter bunches of particles from CERN, allowing a more precise measurement of the time it takes neutrinos to get from one lab to the other. The team will take data from 21 October to 6 November, and expect to see between 10 and 15 neutrinos over that time. "If it works, then we will have sufficient accuracy, no problem," Stanco says."

A Neutrino walks into a bar.

"Am I late?" he asks.

"Dunno, the photon isn't here yet." says the barkeep.

@RobertJ hahahaha :)

So have we invented time travel yet?

So have we invented time travel yet?

Hell yes! We did that back in 2067.......

Good one, Bryster.

Attached Link: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2016796550_apeuswitzerlandbreakinglightspeed.html

"A measurement so delicate and carrying a profound implication on physics requires an extraordinary level of scrutiny," said Fernando Ferroni, president of Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics. "The positive outcome of the test makes us more confident in the result, although a final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world."

amazing...  The old man was wrong!    Next stop send a probe to the Jurassic period..

LOL…and the intrigue continues.

I seem to recall that Eistien said time-travel was not impossible, just improbable.