Well, scientists of CERN announced today that they have found neutrinos that travel faster than the speed of light. Now how about that?

Or someone was too tired and made an error. Let's see it repeated.

Well, it's based on observation of 15000 neutrinos, and I'm sure that they have checked and rechecked all their calculations before releasing this.

My guess is that we are slightly wrong about our previous measurement of the speed of light, or they have incorrect measurements regarding the distance between the two points.

I read I was greater than six sigma, so it is impressive but I would still like to see it repeated just to ensure there weren't any mechanical errors. It's funny, I was just reading about tachyons two days ago and now this. It could be distance measuring error. Or a million reasons we don't understand like a law that at high speeds light speed increases. Well that doesn't make any sense but you get the idea.

Chances are they're tachyons, or particles that have always traveled faster than light speed. No particle can be accelerated past the speed of light, but if they were already going faster than the speed of light, that doesn't violate anything.

What makes you think they're tachyons?

Space-time bends around high-energy interactions, such as ones where speed approaches C. I wouldn't be surprised if they've just found particles at high enough speeds cut through space in a way that just isn't detectable to our current instruments, essentially making the distance smaller than what we are measuring. Then again, I wouldn't be super surprised if there were a mathematical nuance to special relativity which has up to now gone unnoticed. That stuff happens not terribly infrequently. Only time will tell.

There not tachyons. Tachyons have imaginary mass and I believe the OP said they were neutrinos which are not tachyons.

It's either an error or something along the lines of what Cow said.

EDIT: If you want to watch a synopsis of the experiment

Apparently whilst the results cannot be explained by any known sources of error, there are still many 'unknown unknowns' which may be behind all this. I'll wait until those have been ruled out to rethink Einstein's theories, but in the meantime, I'm interested to see where this leads us.

Yes, I am very excited to see where this leads to. Since neutrinos are thought to have mass, them travelling faster than the speed of light will lead to Einsteins theories being invalid. I don't really know what to make of that... Nevertheless, whether it proves to be an error or not, the rest will be interesting to follow.

I think I'm hoping more for the neutrinos-have-no-mass result that the Einstein-is-wrong result.

If the calculations are correct, and the neutrinos have some mass, what do you suppose is happening?

I was talking to a physicist friend of mine and I propsed the following.

String theory allows/requires many dimensions. It is theorized that these dimensions are tightly coiled in such a small space that they are unnoticed by the large scale, much like the earth seems flat to us because it is so large. To simplify the imagery, suppsose the coils are like the grades on a screw. Some screws are wider than others and some have more coils around the center. Suppose the neutrinos are bound to dimensions that have slightly shorter paths and photons slightly larger pathed dimensions. Then a neutrino could reach a point faster than photon by "skipping" distance the photon must travel. It may only be noticeable under high energies because.of the difference in distances of the paths on the dimensions.

Of course I don't have nearly a substantial enough background.in physics to back it up. Normally I just coke up with crazy ideas and he tells me why I'm wrong. But he said he isn't touching this issue because he doesn't even have enough background in physics.

Not exactly technical conversation, but the memes about this are getting really old.

If I had to guess, I would say that our measurement of the speed of light is probably slightly off. That's certainly the easiest to fit into our existing physical theories, and not something that's likely to have been noticed before.

I thought that the experiment had neutrinos and photon beam moving and the neutrinos arrived first. So even if we were wrong about light speed, the neutrinos were outpacing light. I could.be wrong as I yet to have time to sit through the synopsis webinar.

I was unaware that there was an experimentally viable method of measuring neutrinos accurately. The first were caught in a giant vat of purified water deep underground. Could be a lot of error in measurement(I'm sure the physicists have accounted for this in some way). To my knowledge quantum mechanics and general relativity don't mix very well, probably some provision that blah blah blah, undiscovered, neat stuff.

They have a neat setup to measure them apparently. Check out the webinar I linked, it will most likely describe how they measured it.

so we will now be using the speed of neutrino instead of the speed of light as the maximum achievable speed? ;)

No, something is either wrong with our understanding of neutrinos or our understanding of light. If neutrinos have mass then physics just broke, if they are some weird boson like a photon then everything should still be alright, just need to understand quantum mechanics better.

I was kidding, gee.

THIS IS NO LAUGHING MATTER!



Humans just successfully divided by zero(When v was the speed of light) and took the square root of a negative(got an imaginary dilation of time when v > c). Universe is on it's way to doom, countdown 2012.

Nope. The neutrinos were traveling through several hundred miles of solid rock. Light doesn't do that.

Well then there goes that idea.

How about variable speed of light?

The speed of light varies depending on what it's passing through. The speed of light in a vacuum--what we commonly call c--is supposed to be invariant, though.

I would say the we-measured-c-wrong theory.
I feel that, with c being such an important constant, they should remeasure it with current technology. They still have those reflectors on the moon, right?