Posted on 06/08/2012 8:33:17 PM PDT by presidio9
Eight months after the multinational Opera research team caused an uproar among physicists with its findings that some neutrinos appeared to travel faster than light, its findings have been officially refuted.
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, on Friday said that four experiments have found that neutrinos actually travel no faster than the speed of light.
Opera's original measurements can be attributed to a faulty element of its experiment's fiber optic timing system, CERN said.
The findings were announced at the 25th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto, Japan, by CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci.
Life in the Fast Neutrino Lane
Opera's initial findings, announced in September, triggered skepticism among the scientific community because, if validated, they could have meant that Einstein's theory of special relativity was wrong. Special relativity will only hold true when space-time is flat, and if the theory is wrong, it could mean that the curvature of space is hidden somehow.
Another possibility suggested by faster-than-light neutrinos was that special relativity doesn't apply to neutrinos. That would have impacted quantum theory because it's based on the balance between quantum behavior and special relativity.
A neutrino is an electrically neutral elementary subatomic particle with a small mass that usually travels close to the speed of light.
The Opera Experiment
The Opera team shot a high-intensity, high-energy beam of muon neutrinos produced at the CERN SPS accelerator in Geneva at the LNGS underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy, 730 km (454 miles) away and measured the speed at which the neutrinos emitted traveled.
Preparations for the experiment were apparently meticulous. The Opera team worked with experts in metrology, or the science of measurement, from CERN and other institutions to measure the distance between CERN SPS and LNGS with an uncertainty of 20 cm (7.9 inches) over 730 km. Advanced GPS systems, atomic clocks and other sophisticated instruments were used to ensure the scientists could measure the neutrinos' time of flight to within less than 10 nanoseconds of accuracy.
The neutrinos' velocity was determined using high-statistics data collated by the Opera neutrino detector at LNGS from 2009. This detector consists of two identical Super Modules, each being an instrumented target section with a mass of about 625 tons followed by a magnetic muon spectrometer.
It took the neutrinos about three milliseconds to travel the 730 km. This is a measure of the time distribution of protons each time the beam was fired, aggregated and normalized. It's not possible to precisely measure the time of flight of any single neutrino because any proton might produce the neutrino detected by the Opera detector.
E=MC2, Dammit!
Four teams conducted experiments at Gran Sasso in May to check Opera's findings. They are Opera, Borexino, Icarus, and LVD.
Borexino, Icarus, Japan's T2K experiment and the United States' Minos experiment were originally slated to conduct the cross-checks, and it's unclear why the lineup was changed.
"Each experiment necessarily has its own timing system to record the time of its events," Michael Witherell, vice chancellor for research at the University of California Santa Barbara's physics department, told TechNewsWorld.
Opera's discovery of problems with its timing system was announced on Feb. 23, Witherell said. "At that time, CERN said that Opera would have their first neutrino run with the repaired timing system in May. Apparently, all four experiments ran in that May run, and all say transit times were consistent with the speed of light."
Into the Sun
In October,
o500 here, I am not cognizant to respond. Only, I wish to point out, the special theory of relativity is not the speed limit - it is a warning sign. “Beyond here there be dragond.”
See, if you go off into imaginary spsce, you are not coming back.
Imagine trying to find a thread, edge-on, somewhere between here and the moon.
Good luck with that.
Hell, if scientist can imagine dimensions of space beyond our 3 spacial and 1 temporal, up to I believe 21, I can imagine a photon existing in 2 or less from its' standpoint. :^)
Well, there is a book title - “What does a photon think?”
Page one - “Nothing - it does not exist in time.”
Pages 2 thru 199 don’t exist.
Mysteriuosly, page 200 contains a single period, somewhat in the middle.
Or is there an alternate universe where the speed of light is the slowest a given particle can travel?
the universe is infinite. Can you prove it is not?Yes.
Only if you go at night.
Calling Doc Brown.
There is a self-consistent theory (quantum field theory), based upon special relativity, Maxwell's equations, and the dirac equation, and its scalar and vector equivalents, that establishes mathematical relationships between various things you can observe. They are mathematical formulae, however. Nothing explains "why" things behave this way. Why can particles never do better than approach the speed of light arbitrarily closely? Why do Maxwell's equations hold? The best theoretical physicist in the world knows know better than the man on the street. It is just so.
If one were to find exceptions then this whole mathematical structure would be a house of cards. But it is pretty well confirmed by observation, and now you can add another set of observations (neutrino velocities measured to high precition over long distances) to the mix.
Imagine, if you will, a sort of Lotus flower, with a stem (linear Space), and axle where stem expands to form a bud (the planar manifestation or expression of all the linear expressions settling into a common rate of expansion), and a bloom or flower opening up (the volumetric variable expression of Space). In our frame of reference of 'now', we perceive dimension Space as a volume that is expanding. At the leading edge of this 'expansion' is planar space being pushed by linear Saptial expansion. Now do the same with dimension Time, since Time and Space seem inextricably interwoven. Our frame of reference for dimension Time is a planar present receiving liner past event effects. we extrapolate future temproal/spatial reality from a frame of reference we define as 'the present', the planar spatio-temporal location, like the 'leading surface' of the expanding universe. The connections are continuous between when the linear variables began expression and where they are now in unison (or not) forming the expanding 'planar edge of spatio-temporal reality.
Imagine, if you will, a sort of Lotus flower, with a stem (linear Space), and axle where stem expands to form a bud (the planar manifestation or expression of all the linear expressions settling into a common rate of expansion), and a bloom or flower opening up (the volumetric variable expression of Space). In our frame of reference of 'now', we perceive dimension Space as a volume that is expanding. At the leading edge of this 'expansion' is planar space being pushed by linear Saptial expansion. Now do the same with dimension Time, since Time and Space seem inextricably interwoven. Our frame of reference for dimension Time is a planar present receiving liner past event effects. we extrapolate future temproal/spatial reality from a frame of reference we define as 'the present', the planar spatio-temporal location, like the 'leading surface' of the expanding universe. The connections are continuous between when the linear variables began expression and where they are now in unison (or not) forming the expanding 'planar edge' of spatio-temporal reality.
uh... we will all be dead.
Now, can you prove it to anyone other than yourself?
Yes.
One of the 'other' reasons was so they could create 'black holes' that would swallow up all the COOL JOCK type guys, leaving all the cute chicks for the nerds.
So... what if it hits a flat piece of glass, or a mirror?
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