4 ms·
Could it be that the light was recorded moving that fast, but that it is somehow an illusion based on how the data was measured?
by washedup 15y ago
Could 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.