11 ms·

Speed-of-light experiments yield baffling result at LHC

938 points by pmjoyce 15y ago

figital 15y ago
How does one "fire a bean from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles away in Italy"??
- ceejayoz 15y ago
  Using neutrinos, which rarely interact.
mladenkovacevic 15y ago
Tesla postulated that there are faster speeds than light-speed... so he might have been right after all. Or maybe he was just thinking of ludicrous speed.
- omegant 15y ago
  Advancing the spaceballs empire! It might be happening just now!!!
gluejar 15y ago
discussion by people who actually know stuff: http://blog.vixra.org/2011/09/19/can-neutrinos-be-superluminal/ http://blog.vixra.org/2011/09/19/can-neutrinos-be-superlumin...
- vrode 15y ago
  Superluminal Travel is a sexier name.
buckwild 15y ago
I wonder how accurate their time measurements are. If nothing can exceed the speed of light, what makes them think they can rig together hardware that will accurately measure speed at that magnitude?
- realou 15y ago
  Light is not that fast. In the time it takes for a photon to travel between your computer screen and your eyes, modern CPUs will be able to execute many instructions.
gaika 15y ago
It wouldn't break current theory, it would just mean that photons travel slower than "speed of light" and have non-zero rest mass. Constant c in relativity instead of speed of photons would just mean fastest speed possible.
- jasonkolb 15y ago
  Isn't the speed at which photons travel, by definition, the speed of light? And as for the "c" in e=mc^2, doesn't this suddenly make "c" an unknown constant? Doesn't the fact that "c" changes suddenly change the values of the other variables in that equation as well? That seems pretty fundamental to me...
  - zipdog 15y ago
    As I understand it, Einstein's work rests on there being a fundamental maximum 'speed' and it seemed to him as though the speed of photons was that limit, so 'speed of light' became synonymous with this maximum. But it doesn't necessarily have to be so. So if there's something faster, it changes our understanding of photons but not the existence of this fundamental maximum speed. As you note, our efforts to measure c may have been off due to measuring the wrong thing, but I don't know the ramifications of a small % change in c. (I'm not a physicist)
    - kaybe 15y ago
      Yes, it is -the- basic assumptions for special relativity. And no, it doesn't just change our understanding of photons, it changes everything, since it's all connected. All theories I've looked at so far have (at least in higher versions) incorporate relativitity. (Another basic assumption, this time for general relativity, is the equality of inertial and gravitational mass, which is not a self-evident thing. However, so far no difference has been found. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E%C3%B6tv%C3%B6s_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E%C3%B6tv%C3%B6s_experiment)
  - dfranke 15y ago
    Isn't the speed at which photons travel, by definition, the speed of light? Photons speed up and slow down routinely, depending on what medium they're traveling through. c, as it is used in the equations of relativity, is currently believed to be equal to the speed of light in a vacuum. But, with my limited knowledge of GR, my understanding is that gaika is correct and that the rest of the theory can still stand if this equality is broken.
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
A news article where both the scientists and the reporter understate the claims, publish the data, and ask other teams to please prove them wrong. I like this. Most of the time the reporters overstate the research, the scientists keep the data secret, and the general public is left scratching their heads.
- ErrantX 15y ago
  Indeed. Compare that with the other article about this currently on the first page of HN: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_BREAKING_LIGHT_SPEED http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_BREAKING_LIGHT_SPE... Which is less cautious and more of the standard fare of not-very-well-reported science. sigh
  - quux 15y ago
    At least they didn't use the phrase "perverse and often baffling" in this one.
    - broot 15y ago
      Haha, I can't be the only one that got that.
      - mhb 15y ago
        Ah, Gladwell.
    - phil 15y ago
      You've got to admit that, if confirmed, these results would raise new and troubling questions...
  - AgentConundrum 15y ago
    That's the article that's at the top of reddit right now. I came to Hacker News to see if there was a better article here since the reddit one didn't seem particularly well written.
steverb 15y ago
I desperately want to believe that this will somehow enable us to live in a Star-Trek future, even though I'm sure it won't. Would someone with some knowledge of physics care to break down the ramifications of this (if it's not some sort of measurement error)? Please?
- smallblacksun 15y ago
  It would mean that the theory of relativity is not 100% correct (in much the same way as Newtonian physics are not 100% correct). It wouldn't have any direct impact on anything (because relativity still makes correct predictions the vast majority of the time), but it would create the opportunity for new theories which can explain everything that relativity does plus this new experiment to be created. That new theory could have significant ramifications, or it could be a minor adjustment to current theory that changes nothing.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  In any case, I'd like to submit my resume to the Time Travel Bureau. I am a computer collector and I am very familiar with many of the technologies time travelers from the future may want to procure. ;-)
  - planckscnst 15y ago
    Why would they procure them from you rather than go get a fresh new one from the day it was made?
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      I'm not selling the devices - I'm selling the expertise ;-) How do you know the best time and place to buy, say, a Mattel Aquarius or an A-series Unisys mainframe on an ISA board?
  - nixy 15y ago
    Mr. Titor, is that you?
  - 15y ago
coffeenut 15y ago
If I calculated correctly, that's only about .0025% faster than c. Practical implications?
- beej71 15y ago
  Excellent question. Doesn't seem like "must faster", but if the speed of light isn't the limit, what is the limit? All this reminds me of the beginning of Mostly Harmless: "One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn't really any point in being there." I doubt the experiment will be repeated, but it sure would be awesome if it broke Einstein.
  - faragon 15y ago
    And if there is no limit? (e.g. just practical limits, such as energy availability for our current technology/knowledge)
- nickolai 15y ago
  > Practical implications? Print out 90% of physics articles from the century. Get big trash can. Put printout in trash can. Of course i'm exaggerating, but if the story is true, this is going to be big. Speed of light is the main block for things like time travel and a hard limit on communication speed. It doesn't matter that it is only 0.0025%, what matters is that it can be done(if it is confirmed). As a(very poor) analogy, the first CPUs were probably about 0.0025% the speed of the modern ones, yet look where we are today, in no small part thanks to them. The point is, if true, this may well open a whole new realm in physics, and who knows what we will find there.
  - ShawnJG 15y ago
    This is it in a nut shell. While the ramifications are hard to predict at this moment, they are huge. E=mc^2 prob won't effect practical physics that we deal with on a daily basis. but as far theoretical physics the impact is enormous. time space fabric warping, wormholes (existence, creation and artificial stabilization), how fast the universe is speeding apart, our calculations for where things are in our solar system and beyond and a whole host of other things physics relies on the formula to calculate. what i am most excited for is the possibility to travel faster than the speed of light. conventional theory dictated that the more mass you have the more fuel you would need to break the lightspeed barrier, however the closer you approach the speed of light the more fuel you would need therefore increasing your mass infinitely putting you in a perpetual null loop. but if that equation changes and we know that there are particles that travel faster than light speed limit we may have to re-examine this theorem. Especially with new power sources being discovered on the atomic and quantum levels. The splitting of those bonds if harnessed yield promising potential. Not to mention the existence of antimatter which releases catastrophic amounts of energy when in contact with matter. We can't seem to find any right now so were limited with how much we can make which is a miniscule amount. Limits the production seem to be on a physics level as opposed to a technological one. But who knows if the speed of light is up for discussion almost anything can be in a table.
DenisM 15y ago
There was an experiment where an impulse of light came out the other end of a material faster than light could have traveled through vacuum in the same space. The eventual explanation was as follows - imagine that your outgoing bunch of photons looks like this: :::... The first three photons are "invisible" because there is so few of them that they are below the equipment sensitivity. The second group of six particles is more dense and so they are visible to equipment. Hence, it is deemed that the light has "entered" the material when the second group has entered, long past after the first one actually did. Having entered the material the first group has triggered release of energy from the material, and the second group was partially consumed by the material (energizing it for the next time around). The outgoing bunch looked like this: ...::: And this time it was the first group of photons that was detected. So the apparent speed of the beam was higher than the speed of light. However that's not because the same particles traveled faster than light, but because the peak energy of the entire bunch has shifted forward during travel. If you try hard enough, the light will have "exited" the material before it has "entered". Similar thing could be happening here.
- jxcole 15y ago
  That is such a well known result in physics that the likelihood of it occurring here is almost zero. I remember first reading about it and the scientists basically said "we broke the speed of light" without looking for further explanations. These guys seem like they generally don't believe that they have broken the light barrier, but they need help figuring out what they actually did do from the broader community. Due to their very humble attitude, I bet they examined the literature and ruled this particular possibility out very early on. I bet you there is a systematic error, but I don't think it's this one. My general rule with physics is that if I can think of it, then a real physicist will laugh at it's triviality.
  - Confusion 15y ago
    What DenisM is describing is not the result of a systemic error. It is not an error at all. 'Something' is travelling faster than light in that experiment. The problem is that the 'something' isn't a physical object. The common example is the beam of a lighthouse. Suppose a lighthouse revolves once per minute. At one lightyear distance from the lighthouse, the angular velocity of the beam is 2*Pi lightyears per minute, which is much faster than the speed of light. However, this is not a problem: the beam is not a physical entity. There is no single particle actually travelling faster than the speed of light. It's just some construct in our minds to which we assign that velocity. Something similar is happening in the experiment described by your parent and possibly in the experiment in the linked article.
watmough 15y ago
Bearing in mind 'spooky action at a distance', shouldn't we be expecting to see some kind of mechanism that would imply some kind of particle accounting behind the scenes, that might appear as objects or information moving faster than the speed of light?
- danparsonson 15y ago
  Assuming you're talking about entanglement (an effect of quantum mechanics), then no. Since QM describes the behaviour of particles (such as the 'faster than light' neutrinos in this experiment), you can't use the behaviour of particles to describe QM.
fleitz 15y ago
Couldn't it be that the lack of interaction with the electro-weak force allows neutrinos to exceed the speed of a photon in a non-vacuum environment? Or is the article saying that the neutrinos exceed c? edit: More questions, since photons are massless they should be unaffected by gravity except in the sense of following the curvature of spacetime. Could the non-zero mass of the neutrino mean that if you changed the experiment so it fired away from the earth mean that the neutrinos would travel "slower" than photons?
- sorbus 15y ago
  The article seems to be saying that the neutrinos appear to have exceeded c. If it were just neutrinos moving faster than photons through some non-vacuum environment, that would be completely non-notable - experiments have already succeed in slowing light down to almost nothing, after all.
tsycho 15y ago
"...the researchers noticed that the particles showed up a few billionths of a second sooner..." I am impressed that their measuring instruments have a precision that is (statistically significant-ly) smaller than a billionth of a second.
- sp332 15y ago
  How do you think gigabit ethernet works?
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    I don't have the specs, but 100Mbit operates at 31MHz. Remember, quad-twisted pair. So it is likely 1Gbit operates at ~300MHz. Now, 10Gbit probably does operate with a period less than 1ns. (1 billionth of a second)
    - sp332 15y ago
      Over Cat5e, it uses all 4 pairs and 2 bits per symbol, so it's only 125M symbols per second (per pair). I was thinking of fiber, which I think also uses 2 bits per symbol so it would need 500M symbols per second.
Jun8 15y ago
Is it Bbc's policy not to capitalize acronyms? It's CERN, not Cern, and they did it multiple times.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
rckrr 15y ago
We're witnessing an increased vibrational rate of photons; it is, for those who are ready, a beginning of a higher density experience.
- hugh3 15y ago
  Good to hear, I've always wanted to be able to gain weight without looking fatter.
fleitz 15y ago
Keep in mind that given that they said a few billionths of a second that the adjustment to c would be on the order of: (5 nanoseconds) / ((732 km) / c) = 0.000204776269 percent update: AP says it's 60 nanoseconds so (60 nanoseconds) / ((732 km) / c) = 0.00245731523 percent Also in different units: ((60 nanoseconds) / ((732 km) / c)) * c = 16 479.1646 miles per hour Interestingly, the earth moves about 60,000 miles per hour in relation to the sun, could this be explained by frame dragging / Gravomagnetism? This is pure speculation only because the numbers are with in the same order of magnitude.
- nikcub 15y ago
  this isn't about adjusting c, c will always be c the speed of light in a vacuum is a known quantity, it isn't changing. this is about relativity being void
  - artursapek 15y ago
    I think the suggestion is we've mis-measured c, and it should be redefined as the speed these Neutrinos are reaching (if it's a constant maximum)
  - altrego99 15y ago
    Speed of light under influence of any gravitational field is not c.
- VladRussian 15y ago
  as the CERN to Gran Sasso is direction from North-West to South-East, it would be interesting to see the full data as during nighttime the neutrinos would travel in the direction of the Earth traveling around Sun - thus slowed in the CERN/Gran Sasso frame - and during the day they would be moving in the opposite direction - thus they will be boosted in the CERN/Gran Sasso frame. May it be that they run experiments only during business hours ? :)
- jarin 15y ago
  Reading around a bit I believe they used GPS to correct for anything like that. Presumably, if there were frame dragging effects they would be measurable via the GPS satellites, although that could also be the source of an error.
foob 15y ago
If this result is valid then it would mean that neutrinos are capable of traveling .0025% faster than light. There was a supernova that we observed in 1987 (SN 1987) that occurred 168,000 light years away from us. A neutrino burst was observed in 3 different labs about 3 hours before the light was observed. If neutrinos are capable of traveling .0025% faster than the speed of light then why would we observe these neutrinos at a time that is consistent with them traveling at almost exactly the speed of light (slightly less due to their finite mass)? A difference of .0025% would correspond to the neutrinos arriving 4 years earlier! This is the first experimental contradiction to this result that pops into my head but there are probably many more. Plain and simple, this is most likely due to a systematic error in their experiment that isn't being properly taken into account. The result would tear apart well established theories that have been tested time and time again in thousands of different ways. Of course that doesn't mean that they're absolutely right but it does mean that any contradictory result has to be initially taken with a grain of salt (kudos to the article writer for doing this). It's easy to mess up a calibration in such a complicated system and 60 nanosecond errors could potentially pop up. It will be interesting to see the results from other labs but I would advise against getting your hopes up for any new physics.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  The result would tear apart well established theories that have been tested time and time again in thousands of different ways. That's what makes this so exciting!
  - hugh3 15y ago
    No, I'll wait until it's replicated in another lab before I get excited. Failing that, I'll at least wait three years for the "Ohhh yeah, so we checked again and it turns out that [simple explanation X]". On the offchance that this is a startlingly new breakthrough in physics, I don't lose much by waiting three more years before I believe it.
- nickolai 15y ago
  Um... is there any trace of neutrino bursts before that? Im not sure anyone bothered checking, since such a correlation would have been very hard to justify. A neutrino burst 4 years before a supernova... so what? Could a physicist clarify whether neutrinos could travel at different speeds in vacuum like any 'normal' particle, or are 'fixed speed' like photons. We could well have had several waves with the bulk arriving at c-epsilon and no one bothering to check outside the expected time frame.
jholman 15y ago
Why does the link title claim that the result is at the LHC? The LHC is not involved in this story at all. Edit: other than the obvious reason of "linkbait", I mean.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  Well, the LHC is at CERN and this happened at CERN.
mun2mun 15y ago
Some days ago I saw some people here saying that billions of dollars was wasted in LHC. I would like to know their opinion about new findings. The post in question http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2943950 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2943950 .
- pinko 15y ago
  This wasn't the LHC. It was a non-LHC experiment at CERN. (I agree with your sentiment, however.)
  - archgoon 15y ago
    Agreeing still with the sentiment. However, if this is correct, the data from the LHC will confine the new theories, which will be very important.
- calloc 15y ago
  I would personally want more money going into scientific research (NASA, CERN, Fermilab, and others) than into war and supplying ammunition to soldiers and whatnot.
nickolai 15y ago
Similar results seem to have already been obtained in the past http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino#Speed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino#Speed QUOTE In the early 1980s, first measurements of neutrino speed were done using pulsed pion beams (produced by pulsed proton beams hitting a target). The pions decayed producing neutrinos, and the neutrino interactions observed within a time window in a detector at a distance were consistent with the speed of light. This measurement has been repeated using the MINOS detectors, which found the speed of 3 GeV neutrinos to be 1.000051(29) c. While the central value is higher than the speed of light, the uncertainty is great enough that it is very likely that the true velocity is not greater than the speed of light. This measurement set an upper bound on the mass of the muon neutrino of 50 MeV at 99% confidence. /QUOTE The value looks awfully like what we have in front of us today, but the uncertainty was too big to investigate further EDIT : actual paper :http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.0437 http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.0437
- joeyespo 15y ago
  On a side note, it's pretty wild seeing history being written in Wikipedia. The BBC site has just been referenced on that part of the Neutrino article.
- Panoramix 15y ago
  Experimental error seems likely to me once again. 10ns at c is 3 meters, over 730km + uncertainty in time of particle generation and decay + detector uncertainty...I don't buy it. From the project site: http://operaweb.lngs.infn.it/spip.php?rubrique41 http://operaweb.lngs.infn.it/spip.php?rubrique41 OPERA needs an intense and energetic beam of muon neutrinos traveling a distance of hundreds of kilometers to seek for the appearance of oscillated tau neutrinos. A beam of this type is generated from collisions of accelerated protons with a graphite target after focussing the particles produced (pions and kaons in particular) in the desired direction. The products of their decays, muons and neutrinos, continue to travel in generally the same direction as the parent particle. Muon neutrinos produced in this way at CERN cross the earth crust reaching OPERA after a 732 km journey.
  - nickolai 15y ago
TechnoFou 15y ago
Wow..... this is capital news! There is a flaw in our whole comprehension of physics and our basic understanding of everything that surrounds us. There might be faster that the fastest we have ever imagined and based our calculations on. Yet, we see news like "Kardashian hubby's bad first impression" on the first page of sites like Yahoo "news", disappointing...
- Maro 15y ago
  No, no capital news. Almost certainly this is a measurement error or some other mistake. If a couple of years from now nobody found an error and a bunch of independent groups reproduced the results, then it's time for capital news!
OCHEN-VINCENT 15y ago
Well Hellen Blavatsky was right after all; Science must finnally accept not just the existence of matter but of Spirit as well. Besides scientific calculation of speed is based on the assumption that the velocities of transmission of all the colors are the same. Namely, if we call "W" length of the wave of any given color in ether, and "V" the velocity of transmission of that color, and "N" number of vibrations or waves of that color per unit of time, then the formula connecting these is W = V/N. But in order to calculate the rates of vibration Science assumes that the various Vs of the different colors are all equal to one another. This assumption is false and it has been proven that the velocity of red and of blue light are different.This is an important phase in human History-If this is true then the age of the Stars has Just Began.
- tadfisher 15y ago
  wat
  - OCHEN-VINCENT 15y ago
    Oh Yes: In the 17th century Sir Issac Newton declared that light was corpuscular, that is, made of particles. Though there were some outstanding questions, this view was accepted for over 100 years. Then in 1803 Thomas Young proved that light produced an interference pattern after it passed through a narrow slit. Such an interference pattern is a distinctive indicator of a wave. His experiment, along with subsequent work by Fresnel, soon persuaded scientists that light must be a wave. In the 1860's James Clerk Maxwell produced some brilliant mathematics, today known as Maxwell's equations, and proved that electricity and magnetism were integrally related as one phenomenon. As a byproduct, his equations showed that there should exist a certain kind of wave, consisting of a special interlocked pattern of oscillating electric and magnetic waves, an electromagnetic wave. Based on other empirically known constants associated with electricity and magnetism, his equations yielded a calculated value for the speed of this electromagnetic wave. The speed was exactly the same as the velocity of light that had been calculated by other experiments. This remarkable discovery demonstrated that not only were electrify and magnetism one phenomena, but light, a phenomena seemingly quite unrelated, was also an aspect of the same electromagnetic phenomena. After these developments, and for a some time thereafter, scientists understandably had thorough confidence that light was indeed a wave. Against the background of this solid conclusion of science, Blavatsky, writing in 1888 in the Secret Doctrine (volume I of the Secret Doctrine, called "Science and the Secret Doctrine Contrasted), gave her readers an intimation of the future when she hinted with a question. True, the corpuscular theory of old is rejected, and the undulatory theory has taken its place. But the question is, whether the latter is so firmly established as not to be liable to be dethroned as was its predecessor? THIS HAS BEGAN!!
J3L2404 15y ago
"And of course the consequences can be very serious." Understatement of the century.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
nikcub 15y ago
Headline is wrong - this experiment has nothing to do with the LHC
crizCraig 15y ago
54% in this random ass poll say "No way (e = mc^2)" http://www.wepolls.com/p/2879014/Do-you-think-scientists-at-Cern-have-really-broken-the-speed-of-light http://www.wepolls.com/p/2879014/Do-you-think-scientists-at-...
- vixen99 15y ago
  I was under the impression that polls are reserved for use in deciding issues in climate science!
fl3tch 15y ago
Phil Plait puts this into perspective: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/22/faster-than-light-travel-discovered-slow-down-folks/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/22/fa...
mkramlich 15y ago
I bet Fox News and the Republican Party leadership in general are going to somehow spin this into their anti-climate-change, anti-science, anti-intellectual, pro-religion messaging.
- Andys 15y ago
  If all climate research was as honest as this it might be harder to put a spin on it.
  - mkramlich 15y ago
    and so it begins :)
namank 15y ago
Does this mean I have to buy a new textbook! BUT they are so expensive!!!
deleted 15y ago
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jshowa 15y ago
I'm very skeptical about this. It seems like every time a "supposed" scientific discovery gets published in the media before a peer-reviewed journal, it's almost always wrong. The same thing happened with cold fusion, Ida (aka. Darwinius) the supposed "missing link" between human and ape, and NASA's "supposed" discovery of bacterium growth through arsenic instead of phosphorus. It's always disheartening when science gets reported to the media at such an early age of discovery (i.e. the point where it hasn't been criticised and the lead investigator himself says he isn't so sure). It just opens the flood gates for the retarded news to make of moronic headlines like: "Roll over Einstein: Law of physics challenged"
- jberryman 15y ago
  This wasn't characterized as a discovery, either by the reporter or the scientists involved. But it is really interesting. Either you didn't RTFA or I'm not sure what you're complaining about.
  - Juha 15y ago
    I agree, few articles that I have read about this (including BBC) clearly mention this as speculation and a possibility. However probably there are people who still take this as a fact after reading the article. In my mind media has been surprisingly careful with this not to claim this as a new discovery.
powertower 15y ago
Even if the neutrinos arrived faster than light could travel (that distance), it does not mean the neutrinos traveled that fast, only that far... For example: when muon-neutrinos transform into tau-neutrinos, in that moment they could "tunnel" through space-time in some fashion that appears as faster-than-light travel. Or something happens to their probability waves to make them go from existing at point A, to point B.
pitchups 15y ago
Just for reference Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity - does not strictly prohibit the existence of particles that travel faster than the speed of light, it only prohibits acceleration in an inertial frame to reach the speed of light : As per Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light ) "In special relativity, while it is impossible in an inertial frame to accelerate an object to the speed of light, or for a massive object to move at the speed of light, it is not impossible for an object to exist which always moves faster than light."
- hugh3 15y ago
  True, but such a particle would violate causality and allow messages to be sent backwards through time (including, presumably, the message "Hey, don't send this message") which causes potentially nasty causality violations. Great Scott!
robchez 15y ago
As an aside, I just finished reading Walter Issacsons - Einstein biography. Easily the best biography I have ever read. If you don't like biographys, this will change your mind.
splat 15y ago
The paper is now up: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897
biot 15y ago
Considering that neutrinos can pass through a light year of solid lead unimpeded[0], they must face a lot of challenges in determining when a neutrino has been generated and when they are finally able to detect one arriving at its destination. [0] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/neutrino3.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/neutrin...
gluejar 15y ago
The research preprint is now available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897
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base 15y ago
This seems to be somewhat related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varying_speed_of_light http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varying_speed_of_light "The variable speed of light (VSL) concept states that the speed of light in a vacuum, usually denoted by c, may not be constant in most cases." "In 1998, Magueijo teamed with Andreas Albrecht to work on the varying speed of light (VSL) theory of cosmology, which proposes that the speed of light was much higher in the early universe, of 60 orders of magnitude faster than its present value."
azulum 15y ago
But for now, he explained, "we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy". is it really crazier than nothing being able to travel faster than light? it sure as hell isn't crazier than particles flitting into and out of existence at the subatomic level all the time. the fact is, that most things science has uncovered, particularly in the last 100 years, have been nothing short of hysterical. and for this, dear researchers, i thank you.
leoh 15y ago
Old CERN publication from 1998 suggesting that neutrinos could travel faster than c http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/340078/files/9712265.pdf http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/340078/files/9712265.pdf
bitops 15y ago
I'm extremely ignorant when it comes to physics, but I hope it's for real. Maybe a big science breakthrough would interest people enough to start investing more in education.
omegant 15y ago
Lol maybe the speed limit is marked by the neutrinos not by the light... By now... It will be interesting to see how this developes.
fractallyte 15y ago
Taking a different point of view, perhaps there's nothing superluminal about this: what if the neutrinos are indeed travelling at 'true' c, whereas light is 'tiring out' over the same distance? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light) The idea of cosmological redshifts would need revision, and thus our understanding of the universe. But at least c remains unassailable...
bobby07 15y ago
http://i.imgur.com/lZyY0.png http://i.imgur.com/lZyY0.png
grigy 15y ago
I wonder how they accelerated uncharged particles.
scotty79 15y ago
Ok. Call off SETI until we master neutrinos for communication. They pass through matter as it wasn't there AND could be faster than light? Aliens must have been stupid to use radio waves.
neuromage 15y ago
xkcd on this piece of news, spot on as usual: http://xkcd.com/955/ http://xkcd.com/955/
aufreak3 15y ago
The most striking thing that came across to me in the report is that the time difference is 60ns thereabouts! Thats a whole lot of time delay, not a "tiny fraction" as the reports say. Light travels about 18m (~60 feet) in that time. A modern cpu will have processed more than 100 instructions in that time interval. So you don't actually need a CERN quality clock to measure it. So if this turns out to be due to systematic errors of various kinds, I'm wondering what other measurements from the lab will be cast into doubt as a consequence! Exciting result and possibly exciting times ahead for physics.

938 points by pmjoyce 15y ago

figital 15y ago

How does one "fire a bean from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles away in Italy"??

ceejayoz 15y ago
Using neutrinos, which rarely interact.

mladenkovacevic 15y ago

Tesla postulated that there are faster speeds than light-speed... so he might have been right after all. Or maybe he was just thinking of ludicrous speed.

omegant 15y ago
Advancing the spaceballs empire! It might be happening just now!!!

gluejar 15y ago

discussion by people who actually know stuff: http://blog.vixra.org/2011/09/19/can-neutrinos-be-superluminal/ http://blog.vixra.org/2011/09/19/can-neutrinos-be-superlumin...

vrode 15y ago
Superluminal Travel is a sexier name.

buckwild 15y ago

I wonder how accurate their time measurements are. If nothing can exceed the speed of light, what makes them think they can rig together hardware that will accurately measure speed at that magnitude?

realou 15y ago
Light is not that fast. In the time it takes for a photon to travel between your computer screen and your eyes, modern CPUs will be able to execute many instructions.

gaika 15y ago

It wouldn't break current theory, it would just mean that photons travel slower than "speed of light" and have non-zero rest mass. Constant c in relativity instead of speed of photons would just mean fastest speed possible.

jasonkolb 15y ago
Isn't the speed at which photons travel, by definition, the speed of light? And as for the "c" in e=mc^2, doesn't this suddenly make "c" an unknown constant? Doesn't the fact that "c" changes suddenly change the values of the other variables in that equation as well? That seems pretty fundamental to me...
- zipdog 15y ago
  As I understand it, Einstein's work rests on there being a fundamental maximum 'speed' and it seemed to him as though the speed of photons was that limit, so 'speed of light' became synonymous with this maximum. But it doesn't necessarily have to be so. So if there's something faster, it changes our understanding of photons but not the existence of this fundamental maximum speed. As you note, our efforts to measure c may have been off due to measuring the wrong thing, but I don't know the ramifications of a small % change in c. (I'm not a physicist)
  - kaybe 15y ago
    Yes, it is -the- basic assumptions for special relativity. And no, it doesn't just change our understanding of photons, it changes everything, since it's all connected. All theories I've looked at so far have (at least in higher versions) incorporate relativitity. (Another basic assumption, this time for general relativity, is the equality of inertial and gravitational mass, which is not a self-evident thing. However, so far no difference has been found. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E%C3%B6tv%C3%B6s_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E%C3%B6tv%C3%B6s_experiment)
- dfranke 15y ago
  Isn't the speed at which photons travel, by definition, the speed of light? Photons speed up and slow down routinely, depending on what medium they're traveling through. c, as it is used in the equations of relativity, is currently believed to be equal to the speed of light in a vacuum. But, with my limited knowledge of GR, my understanding is that gaika is correct and that the rest of the theory can still stand if this equality is broken.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

A news article where both the scientists and the reporter understate the claims, publish the data, and ask other teams to please prove them wrong. I like this. Most of the time the reporters overstate the research, the scientists keep the data secret, and the general public is left scratching their heads.

ErrantX 15y ago
Indeed. Compare that with the other article about this currently on the first page of HN: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_BREAKING_LIGHT_SPEED http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_BREAKING_LIGHT_SPE... Which is less cautious and more of the standard fare of not-very-well-reported science. sigh
- quux 15y ago
  At least they didn't use the phrase "perverse and often baffling" in this one.
  - broot 15y ago
    Haha, I can't be the only one that got that.
    - mhb 15y ago
      Ah, Gladwell.
  - phil 15y ago
    You've got to admit that, if confirmed, these results would raise new and troubling questions...
- AgentConundrum 15y ago
  That's the article that's at the top of reddit right now. I came to Hacker News to see if there was a better article here since the reddit one didn't seem particularly well written.

steverb 15y ago

I desperately want to believe that this will somehow enable us to live in a Star-Trek future, even though I'm sure it won't. Would someone with some knowledge of physics care to break down the ramifications of this (if it's not some sort of measurement error)? Please?

smallblacksun 15y ago
It would mean that the theory of relativity is not 100% correct (in much the same way as Newtonian physics are not 100% correct). It wouldn't have any direct impact on anything (because relativity still makes correct predictions the vast majority of the time), but it would create the opportunity for new theories which can explain everything that relativity does plus this new experiment to be created. That new theory could have significant ramifications, or it could be a minor adjustment to current theory that changes nothing.
rbanffy 15y ago
In any case, I'd like to submit my resume to the Time Travel Bureau. I am a computer collector and I am very familiar with many of the technologies time travelers from the future may want to procure. ;-)
- planckscnst 15y ago
  Why would they procure them from you rather than go get a fresh new one from the day it was made?
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    I'm not selling the devices - I'm selling the expertise ;-) How do you know the best time and place to buy, say, a Mattel Aquarius or an A-series Unisys mainframe on an ISA board?
- nixy 15y ago
  Mr. Titor, is that you?
- 15y ago

coffeenut 15y ago

If I calculated correctly, that's only about .0025% faster than c. Practical implications?

beej71 15y ago
Excellent question. Doesn't seem like "must faster", but if the speed of light isn't the limit, what is the limit? All this reminds me of the beginning of Mostly Harmless: "One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn't really any point in being there." I doubt the experiment will be repeated, but it sure would be awesome if it broke Einstein.
- faragon 15y ago
  And if there is no limit? (e.g. just practical limits, such as energy availability for our current technology/knowledge)
nickolai 15y ago
> Practical implications? Print out 90% of physics articles from the century. Get big trash can. Put printout in trash can. Of course i'm exaggerating, but if the story is true, this is going to be big. Speed of light is the main block for things like time travel and a hard limit on communication speed. It doesn't matter that it is only 0.0025%, what matters is that it can be done(if it is confirmed). As a(very poor) analogy, the first CPUs were probably about 0.0025% the speed of the modern ones, yet look where we are today, in no small part thanks to them. The point is, if true, this may well open a whole new realm in physics, and who knows what we will find there.
- ShawnJG 15y ago
  This is it in a nut shell. While the ramifications are hard to predict at this moment, they are huge. E=mc^2 prob won't effect practical physics that we deal with on a daily basis. but as far theoretical physics the impact is enormous. time space fabric warping, wormholes (existence, creation and artificial stabilization), how fast the universe is speeding apart, our calculations for where things are in our solar system and beyond and a whole host of other things physics relies on the formula to calculate. what i am most excited for is the possibility to travel faster than the speed of light. conventional theory dictated that the more mass you have the more fuel you would need to break the lightspeed barrier, however the closer you approach the speed of light the more fuel you would need therefore increasing your mass infinitely putting you in a perpetual null loop. but if that equation changes and we know that there are particles that travel faster than light speed limit we may have to re-examine this theorem. Especially with new power sources being discovered on the atomic and quantum levels. The splitting of those bonds if harnessed yield promising potential. Not to mention the existence of antimatter which releases catastrophic amounts of energy when in contact with matter. We can't seem to find any right now so were limited with how much we can make which is a miniscule amount. Limits the production seem to be on a physics level as opposed to a technological one. But who knows if the speed of light is up for discussion almost anything can be in a table.

DenisM 15y ago

There was an experiment where an impulse of light came out the other end of a material faster than light could have traveled through vacuum in the same space. The eventual explanation was as follows - imagine that your outgoing bunch of photons looks like this: :::... The first three photons are "invisible" because there is so few of them that they are below the equipment sensitivity. The second group of six particles is more dense and so they are visible to equipment. Hence, it is deemed that the light has "entered" the material when the second group has entered, long past after the first one actually did. Having entered the material the first group has triggered release of energy from the material, and the second group was partially consumed by the material (energizing it for the next time around). The outgoing bunch looked like this: ...::: And this time it was the first group of photons that was detected. So the apparent speed of the beam was higher than the speed of light. However that's not because the same particles traveled faster than light, but because the peak energy of the entire bunch has shifted forward during travel. If you try hard enough, the light will have "exited" the material before it has "entered". Similar thing could be happening here.

jxcole 15y ago
That is such a well known result in physics that the likelihood of it occurring here is almost zero. I remember first reading about it and the scientists basically said "we broke the speed of light" without looking for further explanations. These guys seem like they generally don't believe that they have broken the light barrier, but they need help figuring out what they actually did do from the broader community. Due to their very humble attitude, I bet they examined the literature and ruled this particular possibility out very early on. I bet you there is a systematic error, but I don't think it's this one. My general rule with physics is that if I can think of it, then a real physicist will laugh at it's triviality.
- Confusion 15y ago
  What DenisM is describing is not the result of a systemic error. It is not an error at all. 'Something' is travelling faster than light in that experiment. The problem is that the 'something' isn't a physical object. The common example is the beam of a lighthouse. Suppose a lighthouse revolves once per minute. At one lightyear distance from the lighthouse, the angular velocity of the beam is 2*Pi lightyears per minute, which is much faster than the speed of light. However, this is not a problem: the beam is not a physical entity. There is no single particle actually travelling faster than the speed of light. It's just some construct in our minds to which we assign that velocity. Something similar is happening in the experiment described by your parent and possibly in the experiment in the linked article.

watmough 15y ago

Bearing in mind 'spooky action at a distance', shouldn't we be expecting to see some kind of mechanism that would imply some kind of particle accounting behind the scenes, that might appear as objects or information moving faster than the speed of light?

danparsonson 15y ago
Assuming you're talking about entanglement (an effect of quantum mechanics), then no. Since QM describes the behaviour of particles (such as the 'faster than light' neutrinos in this experiment), you can't use the behaviour of particles to describe QM.

fleitz 15y ago

Couldn't it be that the lack of interaction with the electro-weak force allows neutrinos to exceed the speed of a photon in a non-vacuum environment? Or is the article saying that the neutrinos exceed c? edit: More questions, since photons are massless they should be unaffected by gravity except in the sense of following the curvature of spacetime. Could the non-zero mass of the neutrino mean that if you changed the experiment so it fired away from the earth mean that the neutrinos would travel "slower" than photons?

sorbus 15y ago
The article seems to be saying that the neutrinos appear to have exceeded c. If it were just neutrinos moving faster than photons through some non-vacuum environment, that would be completely non-notable - experiments have already succeed in slowing light down to almost nothing, after all.

tsycho 15y ago

"...the researchers noticed that the particles showed up a few billionths of a second sooner..." I am impressed that their measuring instruments have a precision that is (statistically significant-ly) smaller than a billionth of a second.

sp332 15y ago
How do you think gigabit ethernet works?
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  I don't have the specs, but 100Mbit operates at 31MHz. Remember, quad-twisted pair. So it is likely 1Gbit operates at ~300MHz. Now, 10Gbit probably does operate with a period less than 1ns. (1 billionth of a second)
  - sp332 15y ago
    Over Cat5e, it uses all 4 pairs and 2 bits per symbol, so it's only 125M symbols per second (per pair). I was thinking of fiber, which I think also uses 2 bits per symbol so it would need 500M symbols per second.

Jun8 15y ago

Is it Bbc's policy not to capitalize acronyms? It's CERN, not Cern, and they did it multiple times.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

rckrr 15y ago

We're witnessing an increased vibrational rate of photons; it is, for those who are ready, a beginning of a higher density experience.

hugh3 15y ago
Good to hear, I've always wanted to be able to gain weight without looking fatter.

fleitz 15y ago

Keep in mind that given that they said a few billionths of a second that the adjustment to c would be on the order of: (5 nanoseconds) / ((732 km) / c) = 0.000204776269 percent update: AP says it's 60 nanoseconds so (60 nanoseconds) / ((732 km) / c) = 0.00245731523 percent Also in different units: ((60 nanoseconds) / ((732 km) / c)) * c = 16 479.1646 miles per hour Interestingly, the earth moves about 60,000 miles per hour in relation to the sun, could this be explained by frame dragging / Gravomagnetism? This is pure speculation only because the numbers are with in the same order of magnitude.

nikcub 15y ago
this isn't about adjusting c, c will always be c the speed of light in a vacuum is a known quantity, it isn't changing. this is about relativity being void
- artursapek 15y ago
  I think the suggestion is we've mis-measured c, and it should be redefined as the speed these Neutrinos are reaching (if it's a constant maximum)
- altrego99 15y ago
  Speed of light under influence of any gravitational field is not c.
VladRussian 15y ago
as the CERN to Gran Sasso is direction from North-West to South-East, it would be interesting to see the full data as during nighttime the neutrinos would travel in the direction of the Earth traveling around Sun - thus slowed in the CERN/Gran Sasso frame - and during the day they would be moving in the opposite direction - thus they will be boosted in the CERN/Gran Sasso frame. May it be that they run experiments only during business hours ? :)
jarin 15y ago
Reading around a bit I believe they used GPS to correct for anything like that. Presumably, if there were frame dragging effects they would be measurable via the GPS satellites, although that could also be the source of an error.

foob 15y ago

If this result is valid then it would mean that neutrinos are capable of traveling .0025% faster than light. There was a supernova that we observed in 1987 (SN 1987) that occurred 168,000 light years away from us. A neutrino burst was observed in 3 different labs about 3 hours before the light was observed. If neutrinos are capable of traveling .0025% faster than the speed of light then why would we observe these neutrinos at a time that is consistent with them traveling at almost exactly the speed of light (slightly less due to their finite mass)? A difference of .0025% would correspond to the neutrinos arriving 4 years earlier! This is the first experimental contradiction to this result that pops into my head but there are probably many more. Plain and simple, this is most likely due to a systematic error in their experiment that isn't being properly taken into account. The result would tear apart well established theories that have been tested time and time again in thousands of different ways. Of course that doesn't mean that they're absolutely right but it does mean that any contradictory result has to be initially taken with a grain of salt (kudos to the article writer for doing this). It's easy to mess up a calibration in such a complicated system and 60 nanosecond errors could potentially pop up. It will be interesting to see the results from other labs but I would advise against getting your hopes up for any new physics.

sliverstorm 15y ago
The result would tear apart well established theories that have been tested time and time again in thousands of different ways. That's what makes this so exciting!
- hugh3 15y ago
  No, I'll wait until it's replicated in another lab before I get excited. Failing that, I'll at least wait three years for the "Ohhh yeah, so we checked again and it turns out that [simple explanation X]". On the offchance that this is a startlingly new breakthrough in physics, I don't lose much by waiting three more years before I believe it.
nickolai 15y ago
Um... is there any trace of neutrino bursts before that? Im not sure anyone bothered checking, since such a correlation would have been very hard to justify. A neutrino burst 4 years before a supernova... so what? Could a physicist clarify whether neutrinos could travel at different speeds in vacuum like any 'normal' particle, or are 'fixed speed' like photons. We could well have had several waves with the bulk arriving at c-epsilon and no one bothering to check outside the expected time frame.

jholman 15y ago

Why does the link title claim that the result is at the LHC? The LHC is not involved in this story at all. Edit: other than the obvious reason of "linkbait", I mean.

sliverstorm 15y ago
Well, the LHC is at CERN and this happened at CERN.

mun2mun 15y ago

Some days ago I saw some people here saying that billions of dollars was wasted in LHC. I would like to know their opinion about new findings. The post in question http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2943950 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2943950 .

pinko 15y ago
This wasn't the LHC. It was a non-LHC experiment at CERN. (I agree with your sentiment, however.)
- archgoon 15y ago
  Agreeing still with the sentiment. However, if this is correct, the data from the LHC will confine the new theories, which will be very important.
calloc 15y ago
I would personally want more money going into scientific research (NASA, CERN, Fermilab, and others) than into war and supplying ammunition to soldiers and whatnot.

nickolai 15y ago

Similar results seem to have already been obtained in the past http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino#Speed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino#Speed QUOTE In the early 1980s, first measurements of neutrino speed were done using pulsed pion beams (produced by pulsed proton beams hitting a target). The pions decayed producing neutrinos, and the neutrino interactions observed within a time window in a detector at a distance were consistent with the speed of light. This measurement has been repeated using the MINOS detectors, which found the speed of 3 GeV neutrinos to be 1.000051(29) c. While the central value is higher than the speed of light, the uncertainty is great enough that it is very likely that the true velocity is not greater than the speed of light. This measurement set an upper bound on the mass of the muon neutrino of 50 MeV at 99% confidence. /QUOTE The value looks awfully like what we have in front of us today, but the uncertainty was too big to investigate further EDIT : actual paper :http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.0437 http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.0437

joeyespo 15y ago
On a side note, it's pretty wild seeing history being written in Wikipedia. The BBC site has just been referenced on that part of the Neutrino article.
Panoramix 15y ago
Experimental error seems likely to me once again. 10ns at c is 3 meters, over 730km + uncertainty in time of particle generation and decay + detector uncertainty...I don't buy it. From the project site: http://operaweb.lngs.infn.it/spip.php?rubrique41 http://operaweb.lngs.infn.it/spip.php?rubrique41 OPERA needs an intense and energetic beam of muon neutrinos traveling a distance of hundreds of kilometers to seek for the appearance of oscillated tau neutrinos. A beam of this type is generated from collisions of accelerated protons with a graphite target after focussing the particles produced (pions and kaons in particular) in the desired direction. The products of their decays, muons and neutrinos, continue to travel in generally the same direction as the parent particle. Muon neutrinos produced in this way at CERN cross the earth crust reaching OPERA after a 732 km journey.
- nickolai 15y ago

TechnoFou 15y ago

Wow..... this is capital news! There is a flaw in our whole comprehension of physics and our basic understanding of everything that surrounds us. There might be faster that the fastest we have ever imagined and based our calculations on. Yet, we see news like "Kardashian hubby's bad first impression" on the first page of sites like Yahoo "news", disappointing...

Maro 15y ago
No, no capital news. Almost certainly this is a measurement error or some other mistake. If a couple of years from now nobody found an error and a bunch of independent groups reproduced the results, then it's time for capital news!

OCHEN-VINCENT 15y ago

Well Hellen Blavatsky was right after all; Science must finnally accept not just the existence of matter but of Spirit as well. Besides scientific calculation of speed is based on the assumption that the velocities of transmission of all the colors are the same. Namely, if we call "W" length of the wave of any given color in ether, and "V" the velocity of transmission of that color, and "N" number of vibrations or waves of that color per unit of time, then the formula connecting these is W = V/N. But in order to calculate the rates of vibration Science assumes that the various Vs of the different colors are all equal to one another. This assumption is false and it has been proven that the velocity of red and of blue light are different.This is an important phase in human History-If this is true then the age of the Stars has Just Began.

tadfisher 15y ago
wat
- OCHEN-VINCENT 15y ago
  Oh Yes: In the 17th century Sir Issac Newton declared that light was corpuscular, that is, made of particles. Though there were some outstanding questions, this view was accepted for over 100 years. Then in 1803 Thomas Young proved that light produced an interference pattern after it passed through a narrow slit. Such an interference pattern is a distinctive indicator of a wave. His experiment, along with subsequent work by Fresnel, soon persuaded scientists that light must be a wave. In the 1860's James Clerk Maxwell produced some brilliant mathematics, today known as Maxwell's equations, and proved that electricity and magnetism were integrally related as one phenomenon. As a byproduct, his equations showed that there should exist a certain kind of wave, consisting of a special interlocked pattern of oscillating electric and magnetic waves, an electromagnetic wave. Based on other empirically known constants associated with electricity and magnetism, his equations yielded a calculated value for the speed of this electromagnetic wave. The speed was exactly the same as the velocity of light that had been calculated by other experiments. This remarkable discovery demonstrated that not only were electrify and magnetism one phenomena, but light, a phenomena seemingly quite unrelated, was also an aspect of the same electromagnetic phenomena. After these developments, and for a some time thereafter, scientists understandably had thorough confidence that light was indeed a wave. Against the background of this solid conclusion of science, Blavatsky, writing in 1888 in the Secret Doctrine (volume I of the Secret Doctrine, called "Science and the Secret Doctrine Contrasted), gave her readers an intimation of the future when she hinted with a question. True, the corpuscular theory of old is rejected, and the undulatory theory has taken its place. But the question is, whether the latter is so firmly established as not to be liable to be dethroned as was its predecessor? THIS HAS BEGAN!!

J3L2404 15y ago

"And of course the consequences can be very serious." Understatement of the century.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

nikcub 15y ago

Headline is wrong - this experiment has nothing to do with the LHC

crizCraig 15y ago

54% in this random ass poll say "No way (e = mc^2)" http://www.wepolls.com/p/2879014/Do-you-think-scientists-at-Cern-have-really-broken-the-speed-of-light http://www.wepolls.com/p/2879014/Do-you-think-scientists-at-...

vixen99 15y ago
I was under the impression that polls are reserved for use in deciding issues in climate science!

fl3tch 15y ago

Phil Plait puts this into perspective: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/22/faster-than-light-travel-discovered-slow-down-folks/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/22/fa...

mkramlich 15y ago

I bet Fox News and the Republican Party leadership in general are going to somehow spin this into their anti-climate-change, anti-science, anti-intellectual, pro-religion messaging.

Andys 15y ago
If all climate research was as honest as this it might be harder to put a spin on it.
- mkramlich 15y ago
  and so it begins :)

namank 15y ago

Does this mean I have to buy a new textbook! BUT they are so expensive!!!

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

jshowa 15y ago

I'm very skeptical about this. It seems like every time a "supposed" scientific discovery gets published in the media before a peer-reviewed journal, it's almost always wrong. The same thing happened with cold fusion, Ida (aka. Darwinius) the supposed "missing link" between human and ape, and NASA's "supposed" discovery of bacterium growth through arsenic instead of phosphorus. It's always disheartening when science gets reported to the media at such an early age of discovery (i.e. the point where it hasn't been criticised and the lead investigator himself says he isn't so sure). It just opens the flood gates for the retarded news to make of moronic headlines like: "Roll over Einstein: Law of physics challenged"

jberryman 15y ago
This wasn't characterized as a discovery, either by the reporter or the scientists involved. But it is really interesting. Either you didn't RTFA or I'm not sure what you're complaining about.
- Juha 15y ago
  I agree, few articles that I have read about this (including BBC) clearly mention this as speculation and a possibility. However probably there are people who still take this as a fact after reading the article. In my mind media has been surprisingly careful with this not to claim this as a new discovery.

powertower 15y ago

Even if the neutrinos arrived faster than light could travel (that distance), it does not mean the neutrinos traveled that fast, only that far... For example: when muon-neutrinos transform into tau-neutrinos, in that moment they could "tunnel" through space-time in some fashion that appears as faster-than-light travel. Or something happens to their probability waves to make them go from existing at point A, to point B.

pitchups 15y ago

Just for reference Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity - does not strictly prohibit the existence of particles that travel faster than the speed of light, it only prohibits acceleration in an inertial frame to reach the speed of light : As per Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light ) "In special relativity, while it is impossible in an inertial frame to accelerate an object to the speed of light, or for a massive object to move at the speed of light, it is not impossible for an object to exist which always moves faster than light."

hugh3 15y ago
True, but such a particle would violate causality and allow messages to be sent backwards through time (including, presumably, the message "Hey, don't send this message") which causes potentially nasty causality violations. Great Scott!

robchez 15y ago

As an aside, I just finished reading Walter Issacsons - Einstein biography. Easily the best biography I have ever read. If you don't like biographys, this will change your mind.

splat 15y ago

The paper is now up: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897

biot 15y ago

Considering that neutrinos can pass through a light year of solid lead unimpeded[0], they must face a lot of challenges in determining when a neutrino has been generated and when they are finally able to detect one arriving at its destination. [0] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/neutrino3.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/neutrin...

gluejar 15y ago

The research preprint is now available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897

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base 15y ago

This seems to be somewhat related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varying_speed_of_light http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varying_speed_of_light "The variable speed of light (VSL) concept states that the speed of light in a vacuum, usually denoted by c, may not be constant in most cases." "In 1998, Magueijo teamed with Andreas Albrecht to work on the varying speed of light (VSL) theory of cosmology, which proposes that the speed of light was much higher in the early universe, of 60 orders of magnitude faster than its present value."

azulum 15y ago

But for now, he explained, "we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy". is it really crazier than nothing being able to travel faster than light? it sure as hell isn't crazier than particles flitting into and out of existence at the subatomic level all the time. the fact is, that most things science has uncovered, particularly in the last 100 years, have been nothing short of hysterical. and for this, dear researchers, i thank you.

leoh 15y ago

Old CERN publication from 1998 suggesting that neutrinos could travel faster than c http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/340078/files/9712265.pdf http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/340078/files/9712265.pdf

bitops 15y ago

I'm extremely ignorant when it comes to physics, but I hope it's for real. Maybe a big science breakthrough would interest people enough to start investing more in education.

omegant 15y ago

Lol maybe the speed limit is marked by the neutrinos not by the light... By now... It will be interesting to see how this developes.

fractallyte 15y ago

Taking a different point of view, perhaps there's nothing superluminal about this: what if the neutrinos are indeed travelling at 'true' c, whereas light is 'tiring out' over the same distance? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light) The idea of cosmological redshifts would need revision, and thus our understanding of the universe. But at least c remains unassailable...

bobby07 15y ago

http://i.imgur.com/lZyY0.png http://i.imgur.com/lZyY0.png

grigy 15y ago

I wonder how they accelerated uncharged particles.

scotty79 15y ago

Ok. Call off SETI until we master neutrinos for communication. They pass through matter as it wasn't there AND could be faster than light? Aliens must have been stupid to use radio waves.

neuromage 15y ago

xkcd on this piece of news, spot on as usual: http://xkcd.com/955/ http://xkcd.com/955/

aufreak3 15y ago

The most striking thing that came across to me in the report is that the time difference is 60ns thereabouts! Thats a whole lot of time delay, not a "tiny fraction" as the reports say. Light travels about 18m (~60 feet) in that time. A modern cpu will have processed more than 100 instructions in that time interval. So you don't actually need a CERN quality clock to measure it. So if this turns out to be due to systematic errors of various kinds, I'm wondering what other measurements from the lab will be cast into doubt as a consequence! Exciting result and possibly exciting times ahead for physics.