# Speed of light broken?



## lonelyjew

If true, this could rewrite physics.



> GENEVA (AP) - A fundamental pillar of physics - that nothing can go faster than the speed of light - appears to be smashed by an oddball subatomic particle that has apparently made a giant end run around Albert Einstein's theories.
> Scientists at the world's largest physics lab said Thursday they have clocked neutrinos traveling faster than light. That's something that according to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity - the famous E (equals) mc2 equation - just doesn't happen.
> "The feeling that most people have is this can't be right, this can't be real," said James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, outside the Swiss city of Geneva.
> Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded researchers that they are asking others to independently verify the measurements before claiming an actual discovery.
> "They are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they've done and really scrutinize it in great detail, and ideally for someone elsewhere in the world to repeat the measurements," he said Thursday.
> Scientists at the competing Fermilab in Chicago have promised to start such work immediately.
> "It's a shock," said Fermilab head theoretician Stephen Parke, who was not part of the research in Geneva. "It's going to cause us problems, no doubt about that - if it's true."
> The Chicago team had similar faster-than-light results in 2007, but those came with a giant margin of error that undercut its scientific significance.
> Outside scientists expressed skepticism at CERN's claim that the neutrinos - one of the strangest well-known particles in physics - were observed smashing past the cosmic speed barrier of 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second).
> University of Maryland physics department chairman Drew Baden called it "a flying carpet," something that was too fantastic to be believable.
> CERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometers) away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant. But given the enormous implications of the find, they still spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there was no flaws in the experiment.
> "We have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement," said Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern, Switzerland, who was involved in the experiment known as OPERA.
> The CERN researchers are now looking to the United States and Japan to confirm the results.
> A similar neutrino experiment at Fermilab near Chicago would be capable of running the tests, said Stavros Katsanevas, the deputy director of France's National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research. The institute collaborated with Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory for the experiment at CERN.
> Katsanevas said help could also come from the T2K experiment in Japan, though that is currently on hold after the country's devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
> Scientists agree if the results are confirmed, that it would force a fundamental rethink of the laws of nature.
> Einstein's special relativity theory that says energy equals mass times the speed of light squared underlies "pretty much everything in modern physics," said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment. "It has worked perfectly up until now."
> He cautioned that the neutrino researchers would have to explain why similar results weren't detected before, such as when an exploding star - or supernova - was observed in 1987.
> "This would be such a sensational discovery if it were true that one has to treat it extremely carefully," said Ellis.


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## Kennnie

That awesome they finally did it!?


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## Neptunus

Wow, very cool!!!!!


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## Cynical

Wow I hope they can confirm this. That is amazing.


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## AussiePea

Honestly I hope they don't confirm this, because the amount of **** that will go down as a result will be mind boggling. As stated though, the "assumption" that nothing travels faster than light has not impeded mankind functionally (if it were to be incorrect) though how this would effect space research and the like would probably be pretty significant.

I'd like to know how they measure that velocity anyway and to that accuracy.


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## Kon

Bohm's interpretation of QM and Bell's theorem tests implied non-local (superluminal signalling/connections):

http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/PWT/lectures/bohm5.pdf


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## obsidianavenger

Ospi said:


> Honestly I hope they don't confirm this, because the amount of **** that will go down as a result will be mind boggling. As stated though, the "assumption" that nothing travels faster than light has not impeded mankind functionally (if it were to be incorrect) though how this would effect space research and the like would probably be pretty significant.
> 
> I'd like to know how they measure that velocity anyway and to that accuracy.


this is pretty much my view. how much of human knowledge would have to be rewritten to accommodate this finding? on the other hand the possibilities of this are quite awe inducing... so i suppose i am torn. damn physics.


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## Cynical

^ I'm glad you mentioned that. It didn't occur to me earlier but since Neutrinos are subatomic particles even if they were able to confirm that it did go faster than the speed of light it wouldn't make much of an impact. It has been said that Einsteins theory of relativity only applies to the macroverse (things that are big in our universe) but scientist have yet to make a sound theory on how to describe the really really small part of our universe. It seems that on a subatomic scale normal physics does not apply.



Ospi said:


> Honestly I hope they don't confirm this, because the amount of **** that will go down as a result will be mind boggling. As stated though, the "assumption" that nothing travels faster than light has not impeded mankind functionally (if it were to be incorrect) though how this would effect space research and the like would probably be pretty significant.
> 
> I'd like to know how they measure that velocity anyway and to that accuracy.


Except the speed of light has been broken before, by our universe itself..


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## AussiePea

Cynical said:


> Except the speed of light has been broken before, by our universe itself..


huh?


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## Cynical

urgh I couldn't find the original article anymore this is the best I could find in short notice (though you might dismiss the source)

"While special relativity constrains objects in the universe from moving faster than the speed of light with respect to each other, there is no such theoretical constraint when space itself is expanding. It is thus possible for two very distant objects to be expanding away from each other at a speed greater than the speed of light. Since the parts of the universe cannot be seen after their speed of expansion away from us exceeds the speed of light, the size of the entire universe could be greater than the size of the observable universe." -wiki

When the Bigbang occurred the universe itself expanded from a subatomic particle to the size of an orange (can't remember exactly/not sure if it was an orange) in nanosecond which was stated to be way beyond the 299,792.458 kilometers per second speed cap.


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## anonymous soul

I'm not sure I understand the difficulty that this would bring..

so now we know that microscopic particles can go faster than light .... and what exactly does this change about how we currently see the universe?


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## wootmehver

Warp drive is now possible!!


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## coldsorehighlighter

Interesting...I know I'll be keeping an eye on this story.


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## Kon

"From what I've read, CERN has decided that if it's a measurement or human error, they can't isolate it, so they released it in order to provide it tons of scrutiny.

In other words, CERN doesn't believe this result is correct, but is challenging everyone else to prove it wrong."

The Register reports that CERN will be publishing their paper on arxiv.org on the 23rd, and that there will be a live webcast of their findings on http://webcast.cern.ch/ at 14:00 CEST (September 23rd)

Neutrino specific findings from the OPERA experiment will be discussed at 16:00 CEST"

Here's the full article that was released only recently:

http://static.arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897.pdf


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## rosettas stoned

Ospi said:


> Honestly I hope they don't confirm this, because the amount of **** that will go down as a result will be mind boggling. As stated though, the "assumption" that nothing travels faster than light has not impeded mankind functionally (if it were to be incorrect) though how this would effect space research and the like would probably be pretty significant.
> 
> I'd like to know how they measure that velocity anyway and to that accuracy.


But this is progress. Remember, people used to think the Earth was the center of the universe.


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## 0lly

I think the guys at CERN are just trollin. Its probably Zefram Cochrane up to his old tricks.


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## Cynical

Interesting, I just saw this. wonder if its true...


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## Zeeshan

Doesnt this make time travel possible?

Uh Oh i hope someone doesnt figure out how to use it

LMAO


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## gilt

Cynical said:


> Except the speed of light has been broken before, by our universe itself..


I think that this is what you meant - a subtle difference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space


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## alte

How long does it take to verify the result?


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## olschool

nothing can travel faster than the speed of light period- if thats true, everything we know about physics will crumble- If they confirm this, how does that help humanity- i mean its very difficult to even prove neutrinos exist


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## nkprasad12

obsidianavenger said:


> this is pretty much my view. how much of human knowledge would have to be rewritten to accommodate this finding? on the other hand the possibilities of this are quite awe inducing... so i suppose i am torn. damn physics.


I think a lot. Relativity is one of the main pillars of modern physics, along with QM.


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## Cynical

gilt said:


> I think that this is what you meant - a subtle difference.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space


That's pretty much what I was saying, unfortunately I cannot seem to find the original article I originally read where they stated how the universe expanded from a sub-atomic particle into the size of an orange in mere nanoseconds.


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## phobiaphobe

I don't know much about it. If neutrinos are neutral, how do they accelerate them? And just to clarify: the Einstein view is that as we accelerate a particle, its mass increases when the velocity approaches the speed of light...at the speed of light, the mass would increase infinitely and that would mean an infinite force is required to accelerate it...is this close to correct? If so, what force did they use to accelerate neutrinos? It's interesting news!


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## Kon

Zeeshan said:


> Doesnt this make time travel possible? Uh Oh i hope someone doesnt figure out how to use it


Some speculations I read. If true (unlikely?) it may mean any of the following:

Photons have some mass?
Special relativity (Einstein's version) is false?
Lorentzian "ether" interpretation http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/PWT/lectures/bohm5.pdf 
etc...​


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## Marlon

phobiaphobe said:


> I don't know much about it. If neutrinos are neutral, how do they accelerate them? And just to clarify: the Einstein view is that as we accelerate a particle, its mass increases when the velocity approaches the speed of light...at the speed of light, the mass would increase infinitely and that would mean an infinite force is required to accelerate it...is this close to correct? *If so, what force did they use to accelerate neutrinos?* It's interesting news!


Your question doesn't really make sense, since you are basing it on a theory that is in contradiction with CERN's experiment.


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## obsidianavenger

Marlon said:


> Your question doesn't really make sense, since you are basing it on a theory that is in contradiction with by CERN's experiment.


their results haven't been confirmed yet... also it still makes perfect sense to ask what force is used to accelerate neutrinos since most particle accelerators rely on magnetic fields, which shouldn't effect neutrinos. i never thought of that, but its a legitimate question... then i found the answer on fermilab's website:

http://www-nova.fnal.gov/how-nova-works.html

basically they accelerate particles that do have charge and that are known to decay into neutrinos... and momentum is conserved. pretty cool!


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## Classified

The Nobel Prize committee should send him a spending ticket.


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## Jcgrey

Very interesting. However, I'm not ready to throw out 100+ years of modern physics on the basis of one experiment. 


> http://io9.com/5843112/faster-than-light-neutrinos-not-so-fast
> 
> By Dr. Dave Goldberg
> *Faster Than Light Neutrinos? Not So Fast*
> _So did the folks at CERN really record neutrinos moving faster than light? Was Einstein wrong about light speed being a universal speed limit? It's too early to tell, and regular io9 contributor Dr. Dave Goldberg has some doubts._
> So what actually happened here? The OPERA collaboration has a detector in Gran Sasso Italy, about 730 km from CERN. CERN produces neutrinos in abundance, and neutrinos have a few important properties: They are very nearly massless and thus, even at moderate energies, we'd expect them to travel essentially at the speed of light. They can "oscillate" or change identities, which means that the mu neutrinos produced at CERN can turn into tau neutrinos which the OPERA detector is designed to measure. They are very weakly interacting, which means that they can pass through solid earth unimpeded.
> Light should make the journey from CERN to Gran Sasso in about 3 ms, but according to the OPERA collaboration press release, they are detecting the neutrinos as making the journey in about 60 ns less than expected.
> In other words, they are claiming that, unless there is some hitherto undetected systematic, neutrinos are traveling faster than light.
> A couple of caveats:
> 
> 
> The actual paper doesn't seem to be up on the arXiv yet, so I don't know exactly what their measurement is.
> Even once it is, I'm a theorist, not an experimentalist, so I'm unlikely to be able to identify the systematics.
> That said, I am pretty darn certain that this result is flawed. Neutrinos have mass, which is why they oscillate in the first place, so if it turned out that a massive particle could travel faster than light (and it wasn't some sort of issue with not correcting for general relativistic effects or something like that), that would pretty much overturn special relativity.
> More to the point, I have a simple calculation that makes me extremely skeptical.
> Remember that the neutrinos are supposed to beat light by about 60 ns over a travel time of 3 ms. That's
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Now consider a supernova explosion. In particular, consider Supernova 1987A:


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## ShyGuy86

My thoughts on the matter are brilliantly summarized by Randall Munroe:
http://xkcd.com/955/


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## Witan

Highly skeptical this is true. It's probably a measurement error or something. But if it *is* true, then our understanding of physics is going to change a whole lot within the next few decades.


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## guppy88

I have family that works at cern. 

I think his name is Gordan Freeman or something?

But no really, i have family there.


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## Witan

guppy88 said:


> I have family that works at cern.
> 
> I think his name is Gordan Freeman or something?
> 
> But no really, i have family there.


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## stylicho

> In other words, CERN doesn't believe this result is correct, but is challenging everyone else to prove it wrong."


That's not what they're saying. They're saying if you can prove there was a mistake then do so.
Anyways, I thought the speed of light was already broken awhile back in Germany :stu.


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## stylicho

> Doesnt this make time travel possible?Uh Oh i hope someone doesnt figure out how to use itLMAO


No. It would mean time doesn't exist.


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## lonelyjew

What gets me is that even ultra-high-energy cosmic rays don't go faster than the speed of light, and the amount of energy in them is just tremendous. The Omg particle was thought to be a single proton, with 50 joules of energy inside it (about the energy of a baseball traveling at 60 mph in a single proton) and even that thing wasn't moving at the speed of light. I think that it's perfectly possible that the neutrinos got there before light, but I would sooner guess that they teleported some of the distance, or somehow shifted through time, before I would guess that they actually surpassed the speed of light.


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## stylicho

http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2010/08/life-universe-graphene

A little something something on the non-existence of time.


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## Cynical

guppy88 said:


> I have family that works at cern.
> 
> I think his name is Gordan Freeman or something?
> 
> But no really, i have family there.


Oh you mean this guy? lol


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