5 ms·
Neutrino found traveling faster than speed of light?
- washedup 15y agoCould it be that the light was recorded moving that fast, but that it is somehow an illusion based on how the data was measured?
- saulrh 15y agoGiven how much data this contradicts, measurement error is by far the most likely explanation; that's why they're releasing their data for review rather than publishing a paper. On the other hand, they're measuring a particle that nobody else has measured before, so it could also not be measurement error. That's the interesting possibility. I want to see where this goes.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoIt wasn't light, it was a stream of neutrinos.
- washedup 15y agoHa, yeah, noted. Thanks!
- sp332 15y agoAren't neutrinos everywhere? How do they know the neutrinos they measured are the same ones they fired?
- cpeterso 15y agoI wondered that too. How do you track a stream of neutrinos for 454 miles?
- rbanffy 15y agoOnce you set them in motion, you pretty much expect them to continue in that direction until they hit something, which, in the case of neutrinos, is incredibly unlikely.
- davedickenson 15y agoI agree, it is unlikely that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light but I don't think we can rule out the possibility that the neutrinos measured weren't the ones generated. If you assume that there can be other forces (for lack of better word) faster than the speed of light, those forces would rarely interact with the physical universe governed by the speed of light, but when they do they could conceivably generate an interference pattern that could perturb other like particles across vast distances. So theoretically if the neutrinos generated at the source interacted with some faster than light force, the result could be perturbation of neutrinos close to the detectors, making it appear that the neutrinos actually arrived earlier than expected. I'm looking into this theory as a means of explaining black holes.
- rbanffy 15y agoWouldn't such interactions create feedback loops that would, in turn, create a cascading generation of neutrinos? I didn't look at the data, but the point in time the detection cuts off is also relevant - it should match the time it took the first neutrinos to arrive at the detector. If some of the original neutrinos interacted with something outside normal spacetime and that made new neutrinos appear closer to the detector, some of the original neutrinos should have arrived at the detector at the predicted time. Anyway, this is a very interesting concept. Hope you can somehow test it.
- rbanffy 15y agoBecause they came precisely from the right direction?
- sp332 15y agoYeah, I was just wondering if you could filter based on wavelength or polarization, like photons. Isn't it really hard to "block" neutrinos coming from other directions though?
- ars 15y agoReally hard? It's virtually impossible. It's incredibly hard to even detect neutrinos, much less block of filter them.
- rbanffy 15y agoIf the beam is narrow enough, you'll have a larger number of detections inside the region the beam occupies while the rest of your detector will present normal activity. While you can't be sure if the neutrinos are coming or going, the odds some unknown neutrino beam source appeared in direct opposition to the one you knew about are very slim. You can also filter by time - you create a source and expect a surge of detections shortly after. In this specific case, they saw the surge before they expected it, indicating the neutrinos traveled faster than they should.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago>the odds some unknown neutrino beam source appeared in direct opposition to the one you knew about are very slim. // Look any direction in the night sky. Do you see a star. The odds of not seeing a star in the direction you're looking are far greater than the odds that you don't have neutrinos coming from that direction. You can't shield against neutrinos, you can't currently detect a neutrinos position at two points in spacetime. Haven't yet read the details about this if they repeated several times with the same result then it looks interesting - have you a link to their paper (to save me looking!) thanks. My first thought was that I wonder if this might be a simple case of super-luminal group velocities or something similar.
- spiffistan 15y agoTachyons, here we come! Or maybe not.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- sp332 15y agoWouldn't this also violate conservation of energy? A particle with any mass, traveling at the speed of light, would have infinite energy. And accelerating a particle to that speed would "push back" on the earth with infinite force, so it might also break conservation of momentum.
- tybris 15y agoWhatever happened, there is one thing we can be sure about: No laws of nature were violated in this experiment.
- kerryfalk 15y agoBut that's why it's interesting, because it's possible that that's exactly what happened.
- pbz 15y agoBy definition the laws of nature cannot be broken, only the "laws" we think nature has.
- sp332 15y agoRight, so if conservation of momentum is violated, then it's not a law of nature. That would be quite a discovery!
- 15y ago
- xster 15y agoBattlecruiser operational
- tr 15y agoNot CERN. Italian group. http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110922/full/news.2011.554.html http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110922/full/news.2011.554.ht...
- wetbrain 15y agoReading the other bbc story on the front page, it looks like the scientists are cautious about the discovery and not claiming that they found something. They found something that may be significant or could be an error, and are looking for review. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3027056 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3027056 (better article and discussion)
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 15y agoThose scientists with their caution, pah! They just want to keep the time-travelling deloreans to themselves ...
- rsanchez1 15y agoSeeing how they keep failing to find the Higgs boson, I guess they felt they had to do something to generate buzz.
- patrickod 15y agoI hope this is tongue in cheek as it's clear from both AP and BBC that this is not a sensationalist release. Also note that the false alarm discovery of the Higgs in CERN this year was not an official release and rather the actions of a rogue researcher.
- rbanffy 15y ago"We have data that suggest we saw particles moving faster than light and we are showing everybody the data because we must have made a mistake, but we can't find it by ourselves after trying a lot" is pretty much sensational enough for those who can understand the implications of the unlikely possibility they measured something that really happened. The odds are they made a mistake. But, if they didn't, the universe just got much more interesting.
- Pablosan 15y agoThis headline is terribly misleading. No one is "claiming" faster-than-light neutrinos. They simply have time measurements that aren't making sense because they show the neutrinos arriving a couple billionths of a second faster than they should, and they are opening up the findings to the wider scientific community to try and explain the anomaly. It irks me when people sensationalize things and put the wrong spin on the data. Stop it.