2nd test affirms faster-than-light particles

A second experiment at the European facility that reported subatomic particles zooming faster than the speed of light -- stunning the world of physics -- has reached the same result, scientists said late Thursday.

The "positive outcome of the [second] test makes us more confident in the result," said Fernando Ferroni, president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, in a statement released late Thursday. Ferroni is one of 160 physicists involved in the international collaboration known as OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion Tracking Apparatus) that performed the experiment.

While the second experiment "has made an important test of consistency of its result," Ferroni added, "a final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world."

That is, more tests are needed, and on other experimental setups. There is still a large crowd of skeptical physicists who suspect that the original measurement done in September was an error.

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Should the results stand, they would upend more than a century of modern physics.

In the first round of experiments, a massive detector buried in a mountain in Gran Sasso, Italy, recorded neutrinos generated at the CERN particle accelerator on the French-Swiss border arriving 60 nanoseconds sooner than expected. CERN is the French acronym for European Council for Nuclear Research.

A chorus of critiques from physicists soon followed. Among other possible errors, some suggested that the neutrinos generated at CERN were smeared into bunches too wide to measure precisely.

So in recent weeks, the OPERA team tightened the packets of neutrinos that CERN sent sailing toward Italy. Such tightening removed some uncertainty in the neutrinos' speed.

"One of the eventual systematic errors is now out of the way," said Jacques Martino, director of the National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics in France, in a statement.

But the faster-than-light drama is far from over, Martino added. The OPERA team is discussing more cross-checks, he added, including possibly running a fiber the 454 miles between the sites.

For more than a century, the speed of light has been locked in as the universe's ultimate speed limit. No experiment had seen anything moving faster than light, which zips along at 186,000 miles per second.

Much of modern physics -- including Albert Einstein's famous theory of relativity -- is built on that ultimate speed limit.

The scientific world stopped and gaped in September when the OPERA team announced it had seen neutrinos moving just a hint faster than light.

"If it's correct, it's phenomenal," said Rob Plunkett, a scientist at Fermilab, the Department of Energy physics laboratory in Illinois, in September. "We'd be looking at a whole new set of rules" for how the universe works.

I don’t understand how measuring something, or detecting something, CHANGES that object’s circumstances. It’s like saying that a tree isn’t 50’ high until I take a tape measure and measure it, but how can that be right, a tree has physical properties regardless of whether I take a tape measure and measure it...

I know. It’s a difficult concept.

But it’s kind of like my sunglasses example. The view (of the universe) does NOT exist until I chose a pair of sunglasses. And I have no way of picking one pair of sunglasses instead of the other.

QM exists in a kind of world where there are many dimensions. Actually, an infinite number of dimensions. But not just dimensions like we are used to like time and space. Other dimensions, like mass and charge and velocity and position and more and more and more dimensions.

I think it was Bohr who said something like “If you think you understand QM, you obviously don’t, because NOBODY does or even can.”

A good book about it is “Quantum Mechanics and Experience” by David Z Albert of Columbia University.

Part of the problem is that gravity is so weak, I had a good long talk with an old physicist friend of mine, what if gravitation is repulsive at long distances? IE, it is ax2-tx3 where t is a very small number.

What a strange concept. I don’t understand in the slightest.

Thanks for the book recommendation, I’ll get it and see what it says.

See ya’,

You do know that IF you see red, the other person will also see red, but you have no way of setting up any kind of messaging system because you cannot pick what you will see.

I was referring also to the French experiments using, I believe, tunneling photons that were measured at superluminal speeds. They transmitted classical music by this means. If someone were able to agree ahead of time that Bach meant go and Mozart meant stop, and then used this means and these music examples to tell another, who also knew the code, what to do, go or stop, then communication would have occurred by superluminal means.

If this is a quantum phenomenon, my bet would be that some of the particles might travel faster than light, while others do not, and once again, we have no way of chosing which ones do or don’t.

Don’t get me wrong, the results are very intriguing, that’s part of the reason this is causing such a stir.

And note that my explanation of things is my understanding of what “classical quantum mechanics” (who knew there even WAS such a thing!) says about the issue and why faster than light communication was impossible. Not FTL travel, just FTL communication or signaling. QM is statistical in nature.
Myself, I am open to the possibilities.

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