8 ms·
New paper claims that the neutrino is likely a faster-than-light particle
- codezero 12y agoI am always weary of a sole authored physics paper, especially in particle physics. Either he had nobody working with him, or nobody wanted their name associated with the work, both raise red flags these days. Direct link to arxiv paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2804 http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2804
- kefka 12y agoInstead of attacking the person who wrote a hypothesis about neutrino speed, do you know who will be duplicating his experiment?
- Bud 12y agoI didn't see the comment as a personal attack. It was merely pointed out that the commenter finds papers with a sole author to be questionable. As for "his experiment", if you actually read the article, you can see that there apparently was no experiment; rather, the paper's conjecture relies on analysis of data from other observations and experiments. So the answer is that nobody will be duplicating the experiment in question, since it does not exist.
- api 12y ago"It was merely pointed out that the commenter finds papers with a sole author to be questionable." That's an argument from authority and/or consensus. At the end of the day, only reproducibility matters in science. The problem with using unreliable heuristics like "single author papers" is that it means the findings of such papers are less likely to be tested or further investigated by others. It introduces a strong herd effect bias into science, which history has shown is not a good idea.
- mistercow 12y agoWhat a scientists' peers think of a paper is important evidence for the general population. Unless you are actively studying a particular field, proxying your expectations to people who are involved with that field is a good idea. It's a heuristic, but it's a useful one.
- Steuard 12y agoHistory has shown that heuristics like this are a fantastically good idea. They've been part of science more or less since science started, and science has accomplished an enormous amount. The number of bold, exciting claims that are entirely wrong is far larger than the number of bold, exciting claims that are even partly correct. Heuristics like "put less trust in single-author papers" (among others) are essential for science to actually make progress rather than spending all its effort chasing mirages. Yes, sometimes an important idea gets overlooked for a decade or two along the way, but the alternative would be to accomplish nothing at all. (Unless you've been a physicist at a major university, you have no idea how many emails those folks get claiming to have quantized gravity or to have proved Einstein wrong.)
- tjradcliffe 12y agoAs a colleague once put it, "I believe papers published by people I know. Failing that, by people who have worked with people I know. In third place, by people who are at institutions I know have a history of good work." Science has a deep internal tension that drives it forward, because it is both inherently elitist and necessarily public. If results are not published they aren't science, because they aren't incorporated by the scientific community. And yet while a) anyone can do science and b) anyone can publish, it is still the case that c) the scientific community is overwhelmingly tightly knit and fairly conservative when it comes to adopting new ideas, and the number of new ideas that get generated is so high that this sort of heuristic really is extremely valuable. Sure there are lone geniuses. There are also lone nutjobs. It's not difficult to guess which one predominates, and these sort of filters do a good enough job of bringing the nut/genius ratio down closer to unity that we are always going to use them.
- api 12y ago
- noobermin 12y agoFor particle physics phenomenology, that's essentially what the field is, people developing physical models and predicting what would be observed due to such models in other experiments...since it's not exactly easy to perform particle physics experiments.
- codezero 12y agoHe used other derived data, and didn't himself perform any experiment which can be duplicated. We'll hopefully get a better understanding of neutrino mass from KATRIN [1], which will likely lead to additional insights into their speed. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KATRIN http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KATRIN
- _almosnow 12y agoScience != PR
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- api 12y agoHave tachyons actually been shown to exist? I was under the impression that they are theoretical, a prediction of some theories but not verified.
- kowdermeister 12y agoNot yet, so far they are theoretical, but this is what the paper is about.
- gliese1337 12y agoThis paper is claiming that they have. If neutrinos move faster than light, then by definition they are tachyons. Nobody has come out and said "we have verified the existence of tachyons, and neutrinos might be some of them". Rather, the claim that neutrinos move faster than light is the claim of verifying tachyons. Incidentally, in this case the claim seems a bit more roundabout: that neutrinos may have imaginary mass, a different but equally-well-defining feature of tachyons, and thus they can move faster than light.
- m0skit0 12y ago"A tachyonic antitelephone is a hypothetical device in theoretical physics"
- SeanLuke 12y ago> The result relies on tachyons having an imaginary mass, or a negative mass squared. Perhaps these two were mixed up?
- mp8 12y agoI suspect it's meant to be negative (mass squared) rather than (negative mass) squared.
- tjradcliffe 12y agoCorrect. Tachyons appear in dynamical equations with imaginary masses, which, when squared, give negative "squared masses".
- lkrubner 12y agoIf true, this would explain the Fermi Paradox. If there is a faster-than-light particle in this universe, then that is what intelligent life would use to communicate. We can assume that aliens that are smart enough to reach the level that they figure out what a neutrino is, would also, eventually, figure out a way to use it to communicate. Edit: in case my point wasn't clear, I mean that no intelligent life form will communicate with the standard parts of the electro-magnetic spectrum, which at best travels at the speed of light, if there is a faster alternative. IF there is a particle that travels faster than light, then it seems likely intelligent life will find a way to send that particle in bursts, allowing at least as much communication as is allowed by Morse Code. The point is, the universe is very big, and the speed of light is very slow if you are trying to converse with someone on the other side of your galaxy, or in another galaxy. So if there is a particle that does move faster than the speed of light, it is likely that intelligent life would attempt to use it for communication. This would explain why the SETI project has not picked up anything yet -- they are listening for the wrong thing.
- temuze 12y agoInteresting. I had to look up what the Fermi paradox is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox But this doesn't solve why the Earth wasn't already visited/colonized, correct?
- pizzashark 12y agoThe nearest life-bearing planet is most likely hundreds of light-years away. Faster-than-light communication doesn't mean faster-than-light travel, and nobody wants to sit in a spaceship for 200 years.
- kowdermeister 12y agoTrue, but the Fermi paradox is about the question of where's everybody, not where's the next galactic pub.
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- gatorek 12y agoThis is an old hypothesis: http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9810355 http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9810355
- dalke 12y agoWhich is likely why the linked-to article says "three theorists Chodos, Hauser, and Kostelecky suggested in 1985 that they might be hiding in plain sight – specifically that neutrinos are tachyons".
- qwerta 12y agoNeutrino is faster than light in the water. To decide about vacuum we have to wait for another nearby supernova.
- marcosdumay 12y agoBesides tachions, it's very interesting to hear somebody talk about the exact mass of a neutrino.
- cbd1984 12y agoOK, how does this avoid breaking causality?
- rosser 12y agoIf neutrinos are, in fact, tachyons, our notions of causality were already broken.
- Steuard 12y agoThis article on phys.org appears to be taken verbatim from a press release written by the paper's author, Robert Erlech. (Here's his website: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rehrlich/ http://mason.gmu.edu/~rehrlich/) From that site, here's a link to what seems to be the original paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2804 http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2804 Just as a minor quality signifier, it looks like this paper is categorized under gen-ph ("General Physics") on arXiv.org. That's unusual for mainstream research: topics like this would usually be categorized as "High energy physics" or "Astrophysics". I don't know exactly what criteria arXiv.org uses to judge when a paper should be moved to the "general" category, but I've had the sense that re-categorization is used as a (weak) form of quality control. I haven't read the paper yet, but this is a truly extraordinary claim. It would take extraordinary evidence (or at least a hint of such evidence) for me to take it seriously.
- tjradcliffe 12y agoI originally thought the SN1987A results--which show the neutrino burst from a supernova in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud arriving at the same time as the light, within error-would easily falsify this but forgot that high energy tachyons approach c from above as their energy goes up, so for the 5+ MeV neutrinos that were detected the velocity difference would be negligibly different from c regardless if the mass is positive of negative. It's a curious result, but I'd still lean toward consistent defects in the data over a tachyonic neutrino, personally.
- omilu 12y agoFrom what I remember of physics, objects get infinitely massive as they approach the speed of light and therefore require infinite energy to get to the speed of light. Is this not correct anymore?
- CurtMonash 12y agoThat's an argument for why objects can't be accelerated to and beyond c. But there's a loophole for objects that are already traveling faster than c when they're first created.