First of all, you're not measuring a vectorial quantity, you're measuring a scalar quantity; so the paper title should be 'neutrino speed', not 'neutrino velocity'.
CERN finds neutrinos faster than light - Page 27
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Nawyria
Netherlands140 Posts
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Xxazn4lyfe51xX
United States976 Posts
On September 23 2011 05:00 cptKewk wrote: You mean that they collided the neutrinos and measured the energy of the created particles? makes sense, haven't read the explination of the experiment but what I meant was why haven't we seen neutrinos move faster than light before? (maybe you answered that just now and I misunderstood you) Actually, we might possibly have before. Fermilab posted similar results, but they didn't have the precision to validate it as statistically significant. The error range on the CERN experiment was 10 nanoseconds, and they found the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds ahead of schedule. That being said, I'm also betting that this is a fluke of some sort. Something hasn't been accounted for... | ||
scFoX
France454 Posts
On September 24 2011 00:30 kirdie wrote: I don't really see the problem. Can't we just replace "light speed" by "neutrino speed" in all documents and formulas and then everything magically works out again? :-) What I mean is: Until now "light speed" and "max speed" was used synonymously. But if we just decouple the two and just use "maximum speed" instead with light speed being very close and neutrino speed very very close, then I don't see this breaking the existing theories. Sorry, but it wouldn't work. Current results in relativity are accurate to much more than the perceived discrepancy between neutrino speeds and the speed of light. If they weren't, people would have found out something was fishy long before. Things aren't that simple. | ||
kirdie
Germany221 Posts
I thought that photons would have mass (as some physics professor once told me that they would have non if they stood still but have one because they move) and I also didn't know that the relativity results are that accurate. | ||
Ian Ian Ian
913 Posts
That and some guy told him to double check his GPS measurements. This is CERN people.. srsly. Also, if we don't really understand neutrionos, why does this break physics? Maybe it's just a phenomenon we don't understand.. or the theory has to be slightly corrected :/ | ||
paradox_
Canada270 Posts
As for this discovery its too early too tell but CERN is a respected institution I wouldn't accuse them of being hacks of somehow faking results. Either there is an effect that hasn't been considered and is unknown or the limit is higher than we know. Only time will tell. | ||
Xxazn4lyfe51xX
United States976 Posts
On September 23 2011 23:10 Mammel wrote: So. I'm a complete noob at physics and everyone is just hyping up that it's either the discovery of the century (or Millenium, or what ever the fuck)/being an error, but no-one bothers to explain why. If we manage to move neutrinos faster than light, what do we get? Or is the point that if something can move faster, then, with enough knowledge/right means, you can make any object do that? Or is saying "Einstein was wrong" so blasphemous that it rises such a shitstorm? Well all our theories thus far say that the speed of light through a vacuum is the fastest attainable speed for an object with mass. Neutrinos have mass and according to einstein's equations, to get anything with mass to move the speed of light (or faster) would require an infinite amount of energy. As for a more practical application, if you're aware of the concept of time dilation, you'll see how big this could possibly be. You might know that the faster something is moving, the slower time passes in its reference frame. Ie, a clock on a rocket moving at near the speed of light would run slower than a clock on the earth's surface. When we break that speed of light barrier though and run the time dilation calculations, we find that it's negative! In essence, we have a particle (the neutrino) that is moving backward through time. Time travel. In essence, if faster than light travel is possible, and we can figure out how to make it work for us, we might be able to make a real time machine. Of course, the other possibility is that Einstein's theory isn't complete, and that time dilation behaves differently at faster-than-light speeds. | ||
StoRm_res
Switzerland891 Posts
On September 24 2011 00:38 kirdie wrote: Ah ok thanks for pointing out the flaws in my ideas! I thought that photons would have mass (as some physics professor once told me that they would have non if they stood still but have one because they move) and I also didn't know that the relativity results are that accurate. It's not completely wrong, but if where talking about mass, where talking about the rest mass. When they move they have relativistic mass according to Einsteins mass-Energy equivalence (because they now have kinetic energy) | ||
Harmen
Netherlands25 Posts
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Oxb
199 Posts
An interesting find though, didn't have time to dig into it myself (and most likely won't) but I can't wait till scientists in Japan and USA verify this, or not. =) GG Physics! | ||
gruff
Sweden2276 Posts
On September 24 2011 00:34 Xxazn4lyfe51xX wrote: Actually, we might possibly have before. Fermilab posted similar results, but they didn't have the precision to validate it as statistically significant. The error range on the CERN experiment was 10 nanoseconds, and they found the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds ahead of schedule. That being said, I'm also betting that this is a fluke of some sort. Something hasn't been accounted for... Someone posted a link earlier in the thread to some phd guy saying the CERN 10 nanoseconds is incorrect and the range is considerably higher. | ||
scorch-
United States816 Posts
On September 24 2011 00:30 kirdie wrote: I don't really see the problem. Can't we just replace "light speed" by "neutrino speed" in all documents and formulas and then everything magically works out again? :-) What I mean is: Until now "light speed" and "max speed" was used synonymously. But if we just decouple the two and just use "maximum speed" instead with light speed being very close and neutrino speed very very close, then I don't see this breaking the existing theories. All relativistic equations are based on c (speed of light). The effects of time dilation and length contraction are based on the lorentz transform and the factor gamma (1/root(1-v^2/c^2)). You cannot simply decouple the two when we have seen exactly what the transform predicts based on a maximum speed of c. If the measurements are accurate, I predict that we will simply learn more about what neutrinos are, not that the special theory of relativity no longer applies or needs to be modified. | ||
DoXa
Switzerland1448 Posts
On September 24 2011 00:46 Oxb wrote: As a physics major myself I would love this to be true and to be quite honest not that surprising at all. If you look at history there have been a ton of excellent physicists who all made assumptions and over the course of years/decades all these assumptions have proven to be false, or inaccurate/incomplete. An interesting find though, didn't have time to dig into it myself (and most likely won't) but I can't wait till scientists in Japan and USA verify this, or not. =) GG Physics! Are there other systems that even can measure with such high energies like the CERN? | ||
Soot
Germany36 Posts
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TBO
Germany1350 Posts
I've never been on their site so I'm not 100% but I'd guess you will find them later on: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/collection/Video Lectures | ||
sirachman
United States270 Posts
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Maenander
Germany4919 Posts
haha, I immediately knew he was a pissed off theoretical physicist | ||
Saltydizzle
United States123 Posts
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hifriend
China7935 Posts
On September 24 2011 00:52 DoXa wrote: Are there other systems that even can measure with such high energies like the CERN? Fermilab in the US and T2K in japan could verify the results. | ||
Soot
Germany36 Posts
On September 24 2011 00:52 DoXa wrote: Are there other systems that even can measure with such high energies like the CERN? If I understood correctly (from listening to the questions), they used neutrinos up to 20 GeV and said something that the earlier Fermilab data included energies up to 200 GeV, and that they might combine the data sets to look for energy dependence. So, yes, there are other systems for this energy regime. Maybe more restricting is that you need a neutrino detector like OPERA somewhere around. And thanks alot, TBO. | ||
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