Posted on 09/22/2011 9:54:37 PM PDT by neverdem
Roll over, Einstein?
The physics world is abuzz with news that a group of European physicists plans to announce Friday that it has clocked a burst of subatomic particles known as neutrinos breaking the cosmic speed limit — the speed of light — that was set by Albert Einstein in 1905.
If true, it is a result that would change the world. But that “if” is enormous.
Even before the European physicists had presented their results — in a paper that appeared on the physics Web site arXiv.org on Thursday night and in a seminar at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, on Friday — a chorus of physicists had risen up on blogs and elsewhere arguing that it was way too soon to give up on Einstein and that there was probably some experimental error. Incredible claims require incredible evidence.
“These guys have done their level best, but before throwing Einstein on the bonfire, you would like to see an independent experiment,” said John Ellis, a CERN theorist who has published work on the speeds of the ghostly particles known as neutrinos.
According to scientists familiar with the paper, the neutrinos raced from a particle accelerator at CERN outside Geneva, where they were created, to a cavern underneath Gran Sasso in Italy, a distance of about 450 miles, about 60 nanoseconds faster than it would take a light beam. That amounts to a speed greater than light by about 0.0025 percent (2.5 parts in a hundred thousand).
Even this small deviation would open up the possibility of time travel and play havoc with longstanding notions of cause and effect. Einstein himself — the author of modern physics, whose theory of relativity established the speed of light as the ultimate limit — said that if you could send a...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Is it possible that neutrinos have no mass and are therefore not subject to Einstein’s equations? That seems to be about as likely as an ability to exceed the speed of light. I know that that hypothesis calls for a redefinition of energy.
I'd spend so much time on the phone I wouldn't get anything else done.
So does light speed up again when it reenters a vacuum?
So just where are the police to give these reckless fools speeding tickets????????
THe speed quoted in the article and discussed in general is the speed of light in a vacuum.
When photons hit another medium, air, glass, etc., it slows down a tiny bit.
As an example, if light passes from vacuum to the atmosphere then through a piece of glass and then back to vacuum, the measured speed of light will slow down in the air, slow down more in the glass and then jump back up upon returning to the vacuum.
The speed quoted in the article and discussed in general is the speed of light in a vacuum.
When photons hit another medium, air, glass, etc., it slows down a tiny bit.
As an example, if light passes from vacuum to the atmosphere then through a piece of glass and then back to vacuum, the measured speed of light will slow down in the air, slow down more in the glass and then jump back up upon returning to the vacuum.
I guess it’s really dark when the neutrinos get to their destination?
Some French guy, as well as someone in California, has been doing this for years, maybe over a decade (because I was still in grad school then) though using some other subatomic particle.
Waht about Cherenkov radiation?
That was an old quote from a high school poster (pre-internet). I guess I forgot the /sarc ?
Although I thought it was pretty obvious.
Maybe the flight path of the neutrinos in space-time isn’t ‘bent’ the same way by gravitation as photons, and is therefore ‘shorter’?
(Whatever the h3ll that means...)
I did not learn time dilation equations until I took physics in college.
I got the sarcasm, I just wanted someone who thinks the speed of light is a fixed, constant barrier to explain that.
To explain why it is, or why I think that?
I was taught in school 186k/sec was the limit. I haven't really updated that concept. Since I don't work in a field where concerning myself with such esoteric things is beneficial, it never mattered.
Of course, they knew the neutrinos in the cave 450 miles away were the same ones from the particle accelerator - right? Did these particles wear name tags, perhaps?
Boy what a universe. Massless particles that have mass and speed limits that aren’t. I guess old Occam would deduce that the same ruler is not being used.
“time is not a dimension, but merely the way our brains deal with the fact that everything in the universe is in constant motion.”
I admit I don’t know a lot about this, but hasn’t it be experimentally proven that time is a dimension with atomic clocks in space?
You know, time for the astronaut traveling at near the speed of light literally slows down.
The faster you move, the slower pace of time. So, time back on earth is 20 years, but time in the near light speed space ship is only five years.
Also, your post is confusing to me. First you say that time is a function of consciousness, merely the way that our brains work, then you say that the past is gone and the future has not yet occurred.
But, then you say that it isn’t linked to our brain, but is a physical reality.
So, which is it?
Here is an interesting show about time travel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiusH2-6OaM
“I admit I don’t know a lot about this, but hasn’t it be experimentally proven that time is a dimension with atomic clocks in space?”
I don’t claim to be an expert either, but how would one prove that time is a dimension with atomic clocks in space?
“You know, time for the astronaut traveling at near the speed of light literally slows down.”
Theoretically. It has yet to be observed.
“First you say that time is a function of consciousness, merely the way that our brains work,”
Don’t recall putting it that way.
“then you say that the past is gone and the future has not yet occurred. But, then you say that it isn’t linked to our brain, but is a physical reality.”
I don’t recognize anything I said in that.
I said that time is our way of dealing with the fact that everything in the universe is constantly in motion. We arbitrarily select objects and measure the passage of “time” in terms of their motion.
Since everything is in motion, everything has changed position and/or state since any point in the past, and there isn’t any way of getting everything in the universe back to its previous positions.
Everything will continue to move, but there is no sense in which “the future” exists now, so you can’t go there.
Ain’t no “which is it.” Just us trying to understand how things work.
There is something called "quantum tunneling" where subatomic particles at least appear to pass through a 'barrier' faster than light speed. I have no idea if it plays a role here.
"Quantum Tunneling is an evanescent wave coupling effect that occurs in quantum mechanics. The correct wavelength combined with the proper tunneling barrier makes it possible to pass signals faster than light, backwards in time."
“Quantum tunnelling is in the domain of quantum mechanics, the study of what happens at the quantum scale. This process cannot be directly perceived, so much of its understanding is shaped by the macroscopic world, which classical mechanics can adequately explain. Particles in that realm are understood to travel between potential barriers as a ball rolls over a hill; if the ball does not have enough energy to surmount the hill, it comes back down. The two forms of mechanics differ in their treatment of this scenario. Classical mechanics predicts that particles that do not have enough energy to classically surmount a barrier will not be able to reach the other side. In quantum mechanics, these particles can, with a very small probability, tunnel to the other side, thus crossing the barrier.
The reason for this difference comes from the treatment of matter in quantum mechanics as having properties of waves and particles. One interpretation of this duality involves the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which defines a limit on how precisely the position and the momentum of a particle can be known at the same time.[13] This implies that there are no solutions with a probability of exactly zero (or one), though said solution may approach infinity. Hence, the probability of a given particle’s existence on the opposite side of an intervening barrier is non-zero, and such particles will appear—with no indication of physically transiting the barrier—on the ‘other’ (a semantically difficult word in this instance) side with a frequency proportional to this probability.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling
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