Shock Study: Light Speed Broken, Challenges Long Held Fundamentals About the Universe

[Versus]

Scientists around the world were floored by yesterday’s announcement that CERN researchers had broken the speed of light, which is the fastest known speed. They presented their work today for further scientific scrutiny.

If proven true by other research groups, it will debunk Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which holds that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.

If that is the case, scientists say they will need to rethink the way the universe works, because then “it‘s not just space that’s affected, it‘s time that’s affected too.” Watch the BBC’s report:

How did this happen? The team — a collaboration between France‘s National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research and Italy’s Gran Sasso National Laboratory — fired a neutrino beam, which is composed of subatomic particles known to travel close to the speed of light, 454 miles underground from Geneva to Italy. What they saw surprised them and made them nervous. It traveled a sixty billionth of a second faster than the speed of light.

The BBC reported the researchers repeated their experiment 16,000 times with enough similar results to achieve statistical significance. Study author Antonio Ereditato of the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus, or OPERA, collaboration at CERN collaboration said they tried to find mistakes in their work, but couldn’t:

“We wanted to find a mistake – trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects – and we didn’t.

“When you don’t find anything, then you say ‘well, now I‘m forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this’.”

Watch Ereditato explain the findings:

As Ereditato says, this news is not to be taken lightly. Physicists remain skeptical until other replication of the experiment attains similar results.

Alvaro De Rujula, a theoretical physicist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside Geneva from where the neutron beam was fired, said he blamed the readings on a so-far undetected human error.

If not, and it’s a big if, the door would be opened to some wild possibilities.

The average person, said De Rujula, “could, in principle, travel to the past and kill their mother before they were born.”

Research groups in Japan and the United States will most likely retest the experiment.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/shock-study-light-speed-broken-challenges-long-held-fundamentals-about-the-universe/

Finally, I found something news worthy to post before anyone else.

[Alan]

It was probably just a system error.

[HumanePain]

There are many components in the overall test where the offset (if erroneous) could be introduced:

1) The "start" clock in Geneva must trigger the "arrival" clock in Italy. This information itself must travel at the speed of light...or electricity, which means that it can actually be slowed down by the various components transmitting the coordinating clock signal, so that even if the neutrino beam was simply the speed of light it would still appear to arrive before the clock signal, giving the appearance of having arrived before the clock signal billionths of a second earlier. This can be calculated for and subsequently calibrated out of the system, assuming they planned for it.

2) Neutrinos bombard our planet every second, if the test facility containing the arrival sensor is not shielded well enough the sensor may be reporting non-test related spurious neutrinos.

3) System power loading immediately prior to the firing of the neutrino beam may introduce an IR drop (current/resistance) in the sensor system (vacuum pumps and magnets turning on etc.) which, if not compensated for and insulated by sufficient capacitors and other filters, may cause an offset to the baseline signal from the sensor, resulting in a false positive from system noise prior to the arrival of the actual beam.

For $25,000 a day plus travel and lodging expenses I will be happy to fly there and attempt to debug the system. Must include a guaranteed 30 year contract and an upfront $100,000 sign up fee.

[Versus]

I know that something is probably being done wrong, but the prospect is still exciting.

[Renatus]

I read this long before you posted it, but I've been sick and debating whether or not to post it:P

Still I rather hope the findings are right, because I would think that this would mean that we've discovered a whole new realm of exciting possibilities to explore. All these attempts at a theory of everything seemed to be trying to turn science into the "its a small world" ride. Unsolved questions are more fun than textbook answers.

[Spooky Spencer]

Originally Posted by HumanePain

For $25,000 a day plus travel and lodging expenses I will be happy to fly there and attempt to debug the system. Must include a guaranteed 30 year contract and an upfront $100,000 sign up fee.

HP, you sound like kind of guy who's putting a flux capacitor into their DeLorean. What do you do for a living?

[Renatus]

Originally Posted by Spooky Spencer

HP, you sound like kind of guy who's putting a flux capacitor into their DeLorean. What do you do for a living?

If he told you, he'd have to kill you

[Versus]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...no-result.htmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...no-result.html

The speed of light appears to have been broken again after scientists carried out a new set of experiments to test measurements that could require the laws of physics to be rewritten.

Scientists have posted new results that confirm measurements made in September that a beam of subatomic particles had travelled faster than the speed of light.

The initial result caused widespread debate as it appeared to break one of the most fundamental laws of physics – that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

The findings have proved troubling for scientists as it goes against Albert Einstein's law of special relativity and opens up the possibility of being able to send information back in time.

The researchers behind the experiments, which involved sending neutrino particles 450 miles through the ground from the CERN facility in Geneva to the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy, have now attempted to rule out one possible source of error.

By tweaking the experiment in an attempt to address a potential flaw in their original experiment, they again showed that the neutrons arrived at the Italian site some 60 billionths of a second faster than if they had been travelling at the speed of light.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or CERN as it is known, said: "This test confirms the accuracy of the timing measurement, ruling out one potential source of systematic error.

"The new measurements do not change the initial conclusion.

"Nevertheless, the observed anomaly in the neutrinos time of flight from CERN to Gran Sasso still needs further scrutiny and independent measurement before it can be refuted or confirmed."

When scientists announced they had measured neutrinos apparently breaking the speed of light in September the result drew mixed reactions from scientists.

Professor Brian Cox, a particle physicist at the University of Manchester and TV presenter, said it would be the most profound discovery in physics for more than a century.

Fellow TV presenter Professor Jim Al-Khalili, a physicist at University of Surrey, said that if the findings were proved to be correct, "I will eat my boxer shorts on live TV".

Speaking after the most recent announcement, Professor Al-Khalili said: "I am not yet ready to get out my knife and fork.

"The results have dealt with some possible errors. There are still a number of other possible errors and uncertainties that they are working on ruling out."

The scientists behind the experiments, who are part of the Oscillation Project with Emulsion Tracking Apparatus, or Opera, collaboration, had conducted more than 15,000 measurements over three years before announcing their results.

They used 10 microsecond long pulses of neutrinos in the initial experiment, but other scientists pointed out that this could be a potential source of error as the pulses were relatively long compared to the difference in time being measured.

In the new test they used shorter pulses of neutrinos, at around three nanoseconds, so they could time the arrival of the neutrinos with greater accuracy.

When the Opera team ran the improved experiment 20 times, they found almost exactly the same result.

It has been posted to the Arxiv repository and submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics, but has not yet been reviewed by the scientific community.

Fernando Ferroni, president of Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics and spokesman for the Opera consortium, said: "A measurement so delicate and carrying a profound implication on physics requires an extraordinary level of scrutiny.

"The positive outcome of the test makes us more confident in the result, although a final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world."

Other groups of scientists are now also working to repeat the findings independently and a consortium of American, Russian and British scientists are planning to send neutrinos from a laboratory in Chicago to the Canadian border to test the results.

Dr Giles Barr, a physicist at Oxford University who is involved the experiments in the US, said: "It's a very intriguing result. The thing that is needed is for more physicists to independently verify what is happening.

"They have done a very careful job of this and trying to look at all the individual details that could fake this effect. They couldn't find anything. It is fantastic.

"They have brought up some other tests they can do to check what is happening and the checks have shown what you might expect if the neutrinos are travelling faster than the speed of light.

"We are going to try to do it ourselves."

He added that if proved correct it could have some profound implications for the current understanding of how the universe works.

He said: "We have this notion from Einstein himself that particles cannot travel faster than the speed of light – that light itself is the thing that travels the fastest.

"The profound thing that could happen here is that some people in a very fast spaceship could actually observe these neutrinos leaving after they have arrived in the place where we have seen them.

"In other words time could be travelling in reverse. It is a very mind boggling thing."

[Versus]

That's from November.

[ape descendant]

OMFG the possibility is mind-blowingly awesome!! I think I just had a sci-gasm.

[Versus]

Main articles: Faster-than-light neutrino anomaly and Measurements of neutrino speed
In September 2011, OPERA researchers observed muon neutrinos apparently traveling faster than the speed of light.[5] In February and March 2012, OPERA researchers blamed this result on a loose fibre optic cable connecting a GPS receiver to an electronic card in a computer.[6] On 16 March 2012, a report announced that an independent experiment in the same laboratory, also using the CNGS neutrino beam, but this time the ICARUS detector, found no discernible difference between the speed of a neutrino and the speed of light.[7][8] Finally in May 2012, the Gran Sasso experiments BOREXINO, ICARUS, LVD and OPERA all measured neutrino velocity with a short-pulsed beam, and obtained agreement with the speed of light, showing that the original OPERA result was mistaken.[9]

From the wiki.

[AshleyO]

So it was a mistake all along?

[Versus]

A terrible, terrible mistake.