5 ms·
The OPERA experiment wasn't a race between neutrinos and photons going from one place to the other - the neutrinos travelled the measured distance between the t
by jbri 15y ago
The OPERA experiment wasn't a race between neutrinos and photons going from one place to the other - the neutrinos travelled the measured distance between the two detection points faster than c.
- DiabloD3 15y agoI never implied it was a race. c is effected by relativity, and the speed of a photon is generally described as c. My question is, have neutrinos merely ran past relativity but not actually broke anything, merely bent it?
- jbri 15y agoc is not affected by relativity. It is a constant. The speed that a specific photon travels at is affected by many things - the medium it's travelling through, for one - but that has no effect on c.
- sliverstorm 15y agoHis point as I gather is, what if c was incorrectly calculated, and photons move at 99.9999% of c while neutrinos move at c. This would of course mean "The Speed of Light" is a misnomer, but that could be adapted. That would certainly be an interesting outcome that does not break the existing understanding we have of c.
- Locke1689 15y agoThat would certainly be an interesting outcome that does not break the existing understanding we have of c. It absolutely does. A massless particle moving slower than a particle with mass is just as much a break in relativity as neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light. In fact, they're equivalent. The speed of light isn't just "the speed at which photons move," it's the speed at which photons move (minus restrictions) because they're photons. Edit: I should say that this is all only true in the case of a vacuum.
- sliverstorm 15y agoNaturally "The Speed of Light" is the speed at which photons move, photons are light. But the stipulation being, what if there is some other constant "x", and it's really e = m * x, and c =~ x? (When I say "c =~ x" I mean in a similar way to how c(air) =~ c(vacuum)) Do we know that cannot be the case? Alternatively, what if the speed of light in a vacuum is not actually the true full speed of light? What if something else is acting on the photons that we haven't thought about, such as gravity or charge?
- ajuc 15y agoc cannot be changed without changing E=mc^2, equations for time dilation, equations for adding velocities, and many others, that have been verified experimentally with great precision. Even as small diffeence would show up in past experiment. So If the true c is greater than old c, old c still has to be there for these equations. So no - updating c is not an solution.