faster than light?

Call me when they repeat the experiment.

 

There is another thread on this topic. We have been making the intellectual posts in that one and saving the crap for yours.

Tom

 

Re: Speed of Light Broken

I've almost always believe light can go faster. We can slow it down so we must be able to speed it up.

 

Re: Speed of Light Broken

Hmmm, that's not what they are saying to the public, where did you read about their skepticism?

 

Re: Speed of Light Broken

I'm just happy we can go faster than light, a little over four years to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is entirely too long, IMHO.

 

Re: Speed of Light Broken

For the last decade, very little really interesting reports have come from any of the large particle accelerator centers. The vast majority of reports have been preliminary "potential" signatures of the Higgs particle. Unfortunately, as the statistics accumulated, the signatures faded away. I'm going to wait till this is independently replicated in a different setup before speculating that the speed of light is not the limit for neutrino travel. Neutrinos are extraordinarily hard to detect and this results in a lot of experimental compensation that must be perfectly calibrated.

 

Re: Speed of Light Broken

There are very few high energy neutrino emitters and detectors in the world to repeat the test, but there are one or two other sites that can do it. The one they used has 1300 tons of lead.

If they could build a detector on a smaller scale and put it on the moon then the answer could be very definitive. The reason is we know the distance to the moon very closely, and we can also shoot a laser at the moon which will give an accurate result for the light speed test.

They could perhaps launch a neutrino detecting satellite into solar orbit. If you can reflect a laser signal off of the satellite, it should return to earth at 2x the time that the neutrinos trip the detector. At those distances the difference would be milliseconds or seconds and therefore very accurate.

The problem is pointing a beam of neutrinos at them since that is related to how the particle accelerator is built. Occasionally the earth in its orbit and tilt and daily rotation should allow the beam to be pointed accurately.

 

Re: Speed of Light Broken

Do you realize how many tons of material it takes to make a neutrino detector?

(Hint - Super-Kamiokande weighs in at 50,000 tons....and that does not include batteries)

 

Dear hyo "naive" silver


I liked sipnfuel's response. How do we know that light is the fastest in the universe?

Yours Truly

Tre

 

Re: Speed of Light Broken

If "bullshit" is a useable "material" we could build quite a few from the BS that emanates from Washington D.C. we could also use the plentyful "Hot Air" to help boost it into orbit! :thumb:

 

Re: Speed of Light Broken

From The Telegraph:

Speed of light broken - an expert's view

Prof Jenny Thomas, of University College London, says the claims, if
proven true, would call into question our very understanding of physics
and the universe…

Before any conclusions can be drawn, the CERN team's results will be
checked by scientists across the globe including at Fermilab near
Chicago, where a similar experiment known as Minos is based.

Prof Thomas – the co-spokesperson for the Minos project – said the
team had thrown up similar results several years ago but had
discounted them because the possible margin of error was too high.

She said: "Our errors were rather large so we dismissed it. Nothing is f
further from your belief than that the results might be correct.
"When I heard about the Cern results my first thought was that they
must be wrong, there must be something they have not taken into
account."

Potential errors could occur in the measurement of distance between
the point the particle was created and where it was detected; the time
it took to travel from one point to the other; or in the structure of the
accelerator which the whole measurement relies upon.

Prof Thomas added: "I think everyone is sceptical. The scientists
themselves have admitted they are sceptical but they cannot see what
they have done wrong.

"We will repeat our experiment with higher precision, hopefully in the
next six months."

The Fermilab team will then begin a second stage of their experiment,
called Minos Plus, which is even more similar to the Cern trial and will
deliver results accurate to one nanosecond, she said.

Einstein was always very particular to make the distinction that he was
a theoretical physicist, not a research physicist and that someone else
would have to devise and conduct experiments to prove or disprove his
theories. You have to wonder what he'd say were he alive today.

[Edit] Two more interesting reads:
LA Times
Washington Post

 

They did. Some 15,000 times.

What we need is another similar experiment. Let's get the SCSC in Texas on the problem...

 

Re: Speed of Light Broken

Since we're capable of accurately measuring time in intervals less than 100 attoseconds, large distance isn't necessary. (1 attosecond is the length of time it takes light to travel three hydrogen atom diameters). It's precisely our ability to measure time in such infinitesimal increments that made this observation possible, and you can be certain that the first thing checked and rechecked was the viability and integrity of the time measuring apparatus used in the experiment. They undoubtedly used fresh sand and polished the glass bulbs to perfect transparency.

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attosecond"]Attosecond - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeptosecond"]Orders of magnitude (time) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

 

Re: Speed of Light Broken

It's either gonna result in a Mr. Fusion Home Energy Generator, or Warp Speed.....cool!

 

Re: Speed of Light Broken

I do, I mentioned that the OPERA project uses 1300 tons of lead alone according to what I found on the internets.

My earlier post said a "scaled down version", it seems the probability of detection is much lower, but then you could have a useable result if you repeat the test n number of times. Of course this could be a flawed assumption on my part.

 

Re: Speed of Light Broken

The delta they measured was 60 nanoseconds with an uncertainty of 10 nanoseconds.

They have a sigma of 6 which makes the result significant. Now they need to repeat the result (earth borne or otherwise) with an independent setup.

BTW here is a design for a neutrino detector that is flown aloft a balloon. Of course I don't know if this is actually applicable to our discussion.

ANITA Project

 

Re: Speed of Light Broken

Virtually all the big detectors are deep underground or deep underwater to keep the cosmic ray contamination to a minimum. Likewise, the statistics require runs of months or longer for really useful set of measurements. Space is probably the worst environment for a neutrino detector. You would need to scale up, not down, due to intense cosmic ray contamination. Keep in mind that the earth is essentially transparent to neutrinos (but not cosmic rays), so a longer baseline is to shoot the neutrinos from one generator site to a mine located detector on the other side of the planet.

 

Re: Speed of Light Broken

I definitely didn't think about the cosmic ray contamination... thank you for pointing out this critical info.

 

More like a single experiment with 16,000 samples.

If construction restarted today, the instrument would be very unlikely to be completed before this issue is settled by others.

 

Wasn't it Einstein that said that the universe is not infinite, but stupidity is?