Apparently, they have, which didn't.Originally Posted by Strange
Order of Kilopi
Apparently, they have, which didn't.
As above, so below
Order of Kilopi
I wasn't expecting that.
It would be amusing if they found that the installers hadn't bothered to cut the cable to length and there was a 20m coil tucked away out of site somewhere....
Established Member
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11...ght_confirmed/
Neutrinos still faster than light in first confirmational testing of CERN results
Order of Kilopi
The updated paper on arXiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897v2
Order of Kilopi
It looks like they've been able to eliminate all the easily imaginable error sources, now is the time where a repeat of the experiment at another site becomes rather crucial.
__________________________________________________
Reductionist and proud of it.
Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn. Benjamin Franklin
Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat tails. Clarence Darrow
A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read. Mark Twain
Order of Kilopi
I was, actually. Even though the pulse duration in the earlier runs was much longer than 60 ns difference, they had very nice agreement between the leading and trailing edges of the pulses. So although repeating the experiment was a reasonable next step, I was not expecting that to end up being the source of the error. Of course, I still think it's more likely that there's some kind of systematic error going on here; I'm very much looking forward to people trying this same experiment in a different location.
Conserve energy. Commute with the Hamiltonian.
Established Member
Yup, Folks! Neutrinos are still faster than light. Time to get used to the idea, stop looking for experimental error, and start looking for an explanation!
Here is my own explanation. Although the speed of light in a vacuum is c.299792.5 Km/sec (as measured on Earth), that vacuum is NOT empty of neutrinos. Although photons and neutrinos are not supposed to interact, I suggest that some kind of interaction – yet to be understood – is in fact taking place, and that light is slowed down by the presence of neutrinos whereas the speed of neutrinos is not slowed down by the presence of photons.
In deep space, I suggest, light speeds up to the speed of neutrinos because the density of neutrinos is far less. This explains why neutrinos from the 1987A supernova arrived only three hours ahead of the photons.
The thinning out of neutrinos, and the speeding up of light (and radio waves), as one moves away from the sun might also explain the Pioneer Anomaly ... it is further away than you think!
Established Member
No, it's not time yet. It would be far more sensible to have totally independent experimental confirmation for the phenomenon before looking for theoretical explanations.
Order of Kilopi
This is the same exact experiment, the same equipment, etc. The test only rules out one possible explanation. It's not time to rule out systematic errors yet.
You want photons to be affected by neutrinos but neutrinos to be unaffected by photons. This seems rather implausible. There's also the fact that the charged particles accelerated in these accelerators and the charged and neutral debris of their collisions approach very close to the measured value of c (currently up to 0.999999964c for the 3.5 TeV protons in the LHC), and this neutrino experiment is the first time we've seen anything go faster. Your idea requires that massive particles be slowed as well, by the same amount as photons.
The Pioneer anomaly can be fully explained as asymmetrical radiation pressure. It's time to stop invoking it as "evidence" for every little bit of apparent new physics that comes along.
Established Member
Or the cable routing was different than what was used for calculations.... or...
This type of systematic error can be insidious and difficult to discover.
Order of Kilopi
No, we should never stop challenging our results. Even when really well established.
Order of Kilopi
Actually that's adequately explained by the neutrinos being emitted before the light, it doesn't need faster than light neutrinos.
__________________________________________________
Reductionist and proud of it.
Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn. Benjamin Franklin
Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat tails. Clarence Darrow
A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read. Mark Twain
Order of Kilopi
Experimental error is the most likely explanation. There are researchers on the team that have said this will require independent verification and more work to rule out experimental error. This is an example of science being done right. Insisting on the FTL neutrino claim at this early stage would be very bad.
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?
The Leif Ericson Cruiser
Order of Kilopi
If someone else conducts this experiment will they build their devices with the ability to make slight changes to the apparatus so they can detect where errors are being introduced?
Solfe
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'That was tops! Who's not good at math? I was all, "Four!"' - Finn, Adventure Time.
Order of Kilopi
I'll guess that the anomaly is connected with neutrino
"oscilllations" between the three different "flavors".
I haven't figured out ... yet ... how it could support my
pet hypothesis that antimatter has antigravity relative
to ordinary matter. It sure seems like it ought to....
-- Jeff, in Minneapolis
http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/
"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"
"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves
Established Member
As much as I would love to see something FTL be proven, mainly as it opens up some new science, I agree that this is not it yet.
It's intresting that the shorter burst didn't yeild a slightly different result, but thats also some good news, as It narrows down the field of what they should look for next as far as possible sources of error.
Such as one I just thought of, is the Earth EM field (magnetic field) strong enough that what we are seeing is an additional Gravitoelectromagnetic effect on nutrino's not accounted for in the experiment yet?
*edited* Replaced wording electro-gravitational with Gravitoelectromagnetic
Last edited by dgavin; 2011-Nov-19 at 03:35 AM.
Order of Kilopi
If it is a GPS error, what does that mean for all the other applications of that technology? Can we expect our GPS systems all to have an inaccuracy of 20 metres that can't be detected even by a team of dozens of scientists? That sounds almost as difficult to believe as faster-than-light neutrinos.
Established Member
If it's a special relativity effect due to measuring something with such high speed using gps, i'd expect the error to change with neutrino energy. Which it did, but not even to one sigma, so was not statistically significant.
Can't the experiment be done at a different energy level?
If it's more complex than that but still due to gps, i imagine a new direction and energies would help to find out.
Like others have mentioned, it could be the apparatus itself. But this has suffered the most scrutiny so far.
Established Member
If there is no clear source of systematic error, and the result is repeated by another team with different equipment, then I bet there won't be a quick resolution to this. By not quick I mean it may go on for decades: The Michelson Morely experiment at the end of the 18th century famously failed to find evidence of variations in the speed of light and there were still people repeateing the experiments with ever more sophisticated equipment until 1930. I've read that Morely himself was unconvinced by his results and kept coming back to the experiment.
If this is a real effect there will probably be a very long wait before we have a solid explanation; there will be no sudden shouts of 'hoorah we have FTL!!' - serious investigators will be pulling at the result, the machine, the experimental method, for a very long time to come, and rightly so. The evidence that this is the real deal will be many years of failed attempts to prove that it is not.
Established Member
But the difference here is one of eras and interest. The Morely experiments and work on the speed of light went on a long time in part because funding didn't just funnel into the work. There was less perception of useful application coming out of the work during the era it was performed in.
In the information age... the speed of light is a very real limit to our current engineering possibilities for sending heavily valued assets, informational ones. So the level of interest and investment in anything that could open doorways to speed up communication has potential for significant investment.
Order of Kilopi
I'd expect the level of funding for possibly having neutrons maybe being very slightly faster than light to be rather low.
it's essentially useless for information transmission, especially of the type you're likely thinking of, and even if practical the increase in speed isn't enough to make it a useful target.
__________________________________________________
Reductionist and proud of it.
Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn. Benjamin Franklin
Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat tails. Clarence Darrow
A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read. Mark Twain
Established Member
No, it's time to re-read the history of polywater and cold fusion.
Order of Kilopi
If further research solidly establishes neutrinos can go faster than light (big "if") then there would be much research to learn the details and develop theory around the new evidence. Undoubtedly there would be interest to see if the principle could be expanded to other things, and if varying parameters could allow neutrinos to go far faster. Showing that ANYTHING can go FTL opens up new lines of research that would not previously have been seriously considered.
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?
The Leif Ericson Cruiser
Order of Kilopi
Yep, but arguing that money would pour in because it might make computers or communications faster is just plain wrong.
__________________________________________________
Reductionist and proud of it.
Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn. Benjamin Franklin
Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat tails. Clarence Darrow
A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read. Mark Twain
Established Member
Exactly my thought. It's not about figuring out how to use neutrinos necessarily, it's about finding something that would change our understanding of the limits of information transfer. Since it violates our understanding of physics at fundamental levels, it's hard to assert WHY neutrinos would be capable of this. And until why is solidly established, whether or not there are applications extending past neutrinos is simply unknowable. Our models would be wrong and until theory and experiment caught up, all there are are gut feelings. My gut feeling is that FTL neutrinos would not open up FTL for anything else, but as it pretty much shouldn't happen with neutrinos of mass at all, I have no way of backing up that feeling.
But investment is also about risk. It would be a calculated risk to invest in FTL information transfer if any experimentally proven method existed at all. The money pouring in is not about understanding science, it's about understanding investment and the sort of advantage such a breakthrough would gain. Investment isn't based on what scientists think is interesting or likely, it's based on risk/reward. The reward for the investment once it becomes plausible at all outweighs the risk up to a certain level of funding.
Order of Kilopi
No it isn't...it could allow faster computers or communication. Almost certainly not with neutrinos, but that doesn't mean the underlying phenomena are irrelevant and of no practical use. If we have a real FTL phenomenon, it's going to be of vast interest for its possible direct uses in those fields as well as others, and the fundamental changes it would force in most of modern physics would have completely unpredictable benefits.
Order of Kilopi
But the issue goes deeper than that, it's not just a simple speed gain. Even if you get slightly FTL communication you'll have the possibility of super-Turing computation by being able to identify a reference frame in which a recursive computation that takes an infinite number of steps gets completed in finite (as small as you want even) time. In essence you'll be able to solve the halting problem, which is quite a big deal.
At least as far as SR applies, which is doubtful in such a situation. But if we have to throw out SR, we'll have to review pretty much any post-newtonian physics (both GR and quantum field theory) as it all depends on SR.
So in either case i think funding would not be a problem.
Established Member
Just out of curiosity a comparrison of the hypothetical effect of gravitoelctomagnetism (GEM) for Earth at the equator is 310ns instead of 60ns, so unless the difference in Earths GEM field rotation at the latitude makes a huge difference (speed of field rotation is important for GEM), I 'm not sure a GEM effect quite explains it, as it looks like it would be a stronger effect.
Order of Kilopi
What?? Really?? That much?? Not 310 picoseconds or maybe
even 310 femtoseconds??
Not that I understand what gravitoelectromagnetism is....
-- Jeff, in Minneapolis
http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/
"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"
"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves
Established Member
According to this article in the Guardian, a competing team doubts the neutinos were travelling faster than light.
Jim Al-Kahlili, a professor of physics at the University of Surrey who pledged to eat his boxer shorts live on television if the Opera result was proved true, was similarly sceptical that neutrinos can move faster than light.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote