# Speed of light broken accidentally - tachyons proven by experiment?



## BRN (Sep 23, 2011)

*Update: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236*

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484

CERN, the Centre for Nuclear Energy Research, has been experimenting with a form of fluid-form subatomic particle known as the 'neutrino'. While attempting to send it to Geneva, measurements showed that the particles arrived about 60 billionths of a second earlier than a particle travelling at _c_ would have.

This is srsbsns, because many of the principles of modern physics are based on Einstein's Theories of Relativity which propose _c_ as an ultimate speed limit for the universe; would it were a particle attempted to accellerate to _c_, time would slow around it to result at _c_ being an asymptote for speed.

If that's bullshit, then Relativity is broken.


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## TechnoGypsy (Sep 23, 2011)

We have a new candidate for the Universal constant! :V


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## ramsay_baggins (Sep 23, 2011)

Saw this on Facebook last night. Really exciting! Good or bad time to be a phyicist, depending on your viewpoint. Science has always known we understand physics _wrong_, that stuff _doesn't work_, so it's pretty cool =3


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## BRN (Sep 23, 2011)

ramsay_baggins said:


> Saw this on Facebook last night. Really exciting! Good or bad time to be a phyicist, depending on your viewpoint. Science has always known we understand physics _wrong_, that stuff _doesn't work_, so it's pretty cool =3


 In terms of sheer understanding it would put us well back to before Newtonian physics, which is disastruous. Yet progress is made in huge leaps at random moments - this sort of result could pave the way for a massive jump in scientific understanding; it's like suddenly finding a new number in a Suduko puzzle that suddenly lets you fill a hell of a lot more in.


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## Rakuen Growlithe (Sep 23, 2011)

Interesting. Reminded me of something I heard about being able to send information faster than the speed of light even though the wave you sent it as wouldn't go as fast. Can't remember it exactly and I don't think it's related.


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## Kit H. Ruppell (Sep 23, 2011)

They're surprised to find something that contradicts what they had previously thought? You sure these are scientists? :V


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## CerbrusNL (Sep 23, 2011)

I sure hope this ain't some kind of fluke / glitch, this could be pretty big!


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## Rakuen Growlithe (Sep 23, 2011)

Found the other report. It is unrelated to the main story but still about trying to go faster than light.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/08/pushing-light-beyond-light-speed.html?rss=1


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## Gryphoneer (Sep 23, 2011)

Kit H. Ruppell said:


> They're surprised to find something that contradicts what they had previously thought? You sure these are scientists? :V


Well, yes, it would be unscientific to scream "*PARADIGM CHANGE*" every time an unexpected result turned up. Peer review and analysis of error sources are important parts of the scientific method. What they did is to present their abnormal results and ask the scientific community for help.

Not that this is likely to turn more than a century of experimental verification topsy-turvy. As noted upthread, lightspeed is utterly fundamental for relativity theory (especially special relativity), so chances are small it's anything other than the number measured for the last 100+ years and confirmed by everyday technology like GPS.

Flawed measurements, on the other hand...


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## Cyril (Sep 23, 2011)

So my physics teacher may have LIED to me?

Interested to see what happens next though, especially if they can recreate what happened.


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## CannonFodder (Sep 23, 2011)

I have a neutrino joke:
Neutrino gets pulled over for speeding, Neutrino doesn't react.

I've had a feeling we were going to run into this, because if C is the universal speed limit then how would you solve the horizon problem?


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## Aden (Sep 23, 2011)

> This is a tiny fractional change, but one that occurs consistently.
> 
> The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery.



Well damn, and here I was under the impression that it was a one-time fluke.
Here's hoping that it's actually legit. I don't want to get my hopes up for a new model if it was just a silly calibration error all along.


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## Tycho (Sep 23, 2011)

Maybe the extremely low mass of neutrinos has something to do with it?


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## Calemeyr (Sep 23, 2011)

I'm a physics major, and I took special relativity last semester. If you want to go faster than light, you must have negative mass. Relativity wasn't destroyed...
Perhaps these neutrinos were "accelerated" by a mysterious force, such as Dark Energy. There could be something very wrong with spacetime in that region. Heck, it might even be proof the Alcubierre Drive works (This I hope, because that means we can have the Enterprise).


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## Tiger In A Tie (Sep 23, 2011)

I kinda like that about science, things are always changing and there's always something new to learn. This new finding is cool, I think we may have just scratched the surface of something huge.


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## Ikrit (Sep 23, 2011)

maybe they can go faster becuse they have less mass then light
since light has to have some form of mass if it's affected by gravity


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## Aden (Sep 23, 2011)

Marcus Stormchaser said:


> I'm a physics major, and I took special relativity last semester. If you want to go faster than light, you must have negative mass.



...under our current understanding, which is being called into question here. Nothing wrong with that; that's what science is!

\Neutrinos don't have negative mass. They don't even have zero mass.


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## CannonFodder (Sep 23, 2011)

Maybe neutrinos don't react to the higgs?
*edit*
No wait that wouldn't make sense.


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## Tycho (Sep 23, 2011)

Ikrit said:


> maybe they can go faster becuse they have less mass then light
> since light has to have some form of mass if it's affected by gravity



Light/photons have no mass and exist as both particles and waves IIRC.


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## M. LeRenard (Sep 23, 2011)

I'm curious how they know the distance between CERN and this place in Italy to such precision.  I'm also concerned that they went to the media before their results had a chance to be peer-reviewed and scrutinized.  But we'll see.  It would be exciting, because something would have to change if this turned out to be a real thing.


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## Kamatz (Sep 23, 2011)

SIX said:


> In terms of sheer understanding it would put us well back to before Newtonian physics, which is disastruous.



Nope. It would leave us exactly where we are, but it's like someone removed a big curtain in front of us that we never noticed and now it's obvious that there's a lot more to see. It's not disastrous, it's fantastic!

Another interesting dilemma: there's no way to prove the universe is "knowable". Once you discover a fundamental law of nature, there's no way to know if it is actually correct or if you stumbled upon a very good approximation. There could be an infinite number of such laws. If this is true then discovering that Einstein was only partially correct doesn't actually get us any closer to infinity. Blows my mind.


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## Aden (Sep 23, 2011)

M. Le Renard said:


> I'm also concerned that they went to the media before their results had a chance to be peer-reviewed and scrutinized.



I think they released their findings publicly for the purpose of peer review. Only inevitable that the media picks up on it; I don't think CERN "went to the media" specifically.


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## Fay V (Sep 23, 2011)

I don't think I understand relativity very well. if time slows for you the faster you go, why isn't it possible that as it hit light speed time did stop for the particles and the particle did travel the distance in that time but it appeared shorter due to the lack or time...

or wait nevermind I think I got it backwards. that would make it so time sped up for the particles so essentially the rest of the world slowed. So the particles aged and we didn't...fuck physics man >.<


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## Deo (Sep 23, 2011)

Aden said:


> I think they released their findings publicly for the purpose of peer review. Only inevitable that the media picks up on it; I don't think CERN "went to the media" specifically.


The media sort of follows CERN. Remember when they started the LHC and the media shit bricks end-of-the-world style. Well, it's getting close to 2012 and there are morons to bamboozle with CERN-apocalypse stories so the media sort of stalks it.


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## BRN (Sep 23, 2011)

Tycho said:


> Light/photons have no mass and exist as both particles and waves IIRC.



uhgnngu... Almost, sorta, kinda. Light is a form of energy, but e=mc^2; energy _is_ mass, mass _is_ energy; it gets complex. Particle-wave duality is also complex; light travels as a wave does, but is photons. It's like taking the sinusoid wave form, and only having a non-zero amplitude of energy at certain points along it. It's heavy quantum stuff.



Fay V said:


> I don't think I understand relativity very well. if time slows for you the faster you go, why isn't it possible that as it hit light speed time did stop for the particles and the particle did travel the distance in that time but it appeared shorter due to the lack or time...
> 
> or wait nevermind I think I got it backwards. that would make it so time sped up for the particles so essentially the rest of the world slowed. So the particles aged and we didn't...fuck physics man >.<


If time 'stopped', it would only have stopped from the neutrino's perspective. From ours, they would have suddenly traveled an infinite distance in zero time, which isn't what was observed.

Relativity suggests _c_ as a cosmic speed limit through the three dimensions of space, which is protected by bending the fourth dimension of time around it, but it's hard to use it as a theory to explain what's going on if the neutrinos actually managed to breach c - simply because it renders relativity useless as an explanatory system.


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## Term_the_Schmuck (Sep 23, 2011)

I accidentally the time-space continuum.

Also proposing a theme song for the thread.

[yt]6c6Ekc9TYVk[/yt]


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## Antonin Scalia (Sep 23, 2011)

I used to be able to see the future, but now there is a large tachyon event blocking my sight.  Suggestions?


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## DarrylWolf (Sep 23, 2011)

So they broke the speed of light. "Accidentally"- sure they can SAY that as much as they want but we all know it was no accident. I think this was planned from the start but now the question is- what does the breaking of the speed of light have to do with us and more importantly, how can I profit from it?


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## Onnes (Sep 23, 2011)

First, one experiment reporting a faster than light neutrino does not mean that the speed of light has been broken. Even particle physics relies on independent replication of results.

Second, most of the physics community is operating under the assumption that the CERN group fucked up. This is hardly the first time someone has claimed to break the speed of light barrier, and all of those previous claims have turned out to be erroneous.


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## DarrylWolf (Sep 23, 2011)

Onnes said:


> First, one experiment reporting a faster than light neutrino does not mean that the speed of light has been broken. Even particle physics relies on independent replication of results.  Second, most of the physics community is operating under the assumption that the CERN group fucked up. This is hardly the first time someone has claimed to break the speed of light barrier, and all of those previous claims have turned out to be erroneous.


  So they didn't actually break the speed of light so they should stop bragging. And I think that CERN should be careful because they might create a black hole within the Earth that will suck up life as we know it. We'll need safeguards against that because many of us are rather fond of living!


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## Lobar (Sep 23, 2011)

60 billionths of a second isn't much, most likely all we've discovered a new type of error to account for when working with these particles.  At the very most, we'll be adding a qualifying disclaimer or two to the laws of physics rather than throwing out the book and starting over.



DarrylWolf said:


> And I think that CERN should be careful because they might create a black hole within the Earth that will suck up life as we know it. We'll need safeguards against that because many of us are rather fond of living!



Luddite.


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## CannonFodder (Sep 23, 2011)

Term_the_Schmuck said:


> I accidentally the time-space continuum.


Incorrect, Neutrinos constantly penetrate everything in the universe without you knowing, it's just now we know they accidentally the speed of light as well.
Inb4 chris hansen joke


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## Sar (Sep 23, 2011)

Well c is accepted as 3x10[SUP]8[/SUP] ms[SUP]-1[/SUP]
If this is not a fluke, I doubt this number will change greatly.


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## Stratto the Hawk (Sep 23, 2011)

Sarukai said:


> Well c is accepted as 3*10e8 m/s.
> If this is not a fluke, I doubt this number will change greatly.


I have never seen someone do this, but shouldn't that be 3.00e8? Or alternatively 3.00*10^8?


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## ArielMT (Sep 23, 2011)

Fay V said:


> I don't think I understand relativity very well. if time slows for you the faster you go, why isn't it possible that as it hit light speed time did stop for the particles and the particle did travel the distance in that time but it appeared shorter due to the lack or time...
> 
> or wait nevermind I think I got it backwards. that would make it so time sped up for the particles so essentially the rest of the world slowed. So the particles aged and we didn't...fuck physics man >.<



The amount of time the particles experience is largely irrelevant because both the speed of the particles and the speed of light were measured within the same frame of reference: relative to the Earth.



Onnes said:


> First, one experiment reporting a faster than light neutrino does not mean that the speed of light has been broken. Even particle physics relies on independent replication of results.
> 
> Second, most of the physics community is operating under the assumption that the CERN group fucked up. This is hardly the first time someone has claimed to break the speed of light barrier, and all of those previous claims have turned out to be erroneous.



The one experiment was repeated 15,000 times, according to the BBC story.  Also, the impression I got from CERN was, "Hey, guys, check out what we got.  Yup, it doesn't make sense to us, either, and we really don't want to look like quacks and say we went faster than light.  Can you guys make sure we didn't overlook something here?  Thanks."

This'd be pretty neat if it means ansibles aren't purely sci-fi things.

Maybe one of the things the scientists need to look at is the movement of the two sites relative to each other.  Is the change in the shape of the Mediterranean region as Africa drifts northward so insignificant that it wouldn't reduce the distance between the two facilities enough to result in an arrival time error this large?


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## Tycho (Sep 23, 2011)

Antonin Scalia said:


> I used to be able to see the future, but now there is a large tachyon event blocking my sight.  Suggestions?



Calibrate your deflector dish to emit a pulsing phased charge of tetrion energy.


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## BRN (Sep 23, 2011)

ArielMT said:


> Maybe one of the things the scientists need to look at is the movement of the two sites relative to each other.  Is the change in the shape of the Mediterranean region as Africa drifts northward so insignificant that it wouldn't reduce the distance between the two facilities enough to result in an arrival time error this large?



   As reasonable as that sounds, plate tectonics won't account for this - the neutrinos weren't fired through a rock tunnel, but a particle accellerator - which wouldn't change length even if the ground beneath it shifted. Or, to be less wordy, the displacement was precisely and accurately known, and so plate tectonics has no meaning.


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## Onnes (Sep 23, 2011)

Time dilation is an interesting phenomenon. The amount of time dilation is proportional to the Lorentz factor, which goes to infinity as velocity approaches c. So consider something like a muon, which typically decays in 2.2 microseconds. If you get the muon moving fast enough, it's observed lifetime will be something much, much longer--this is why muons created in upper atmosphere are currently bombarding you.



ArielMT said:


> The one experiment was repeated 15,000 times, according to the BBC story.



That would be over 15k data points. Each point, however, will carry the same errors in theory, design, and error analysis.



> Maybe one of the things the scientists need to look at is the movement of the two sites relative to each other.  Is the change in the shape of the Mediterranean region as Africa drifts northward so insignificant that it wouldn't reduce the distance between the two facilities enough to result in an arrival time error this large?



Apparently they averaged a bunch of GPS readings to figure out location and relative velocity of their source and detector. Continental drift was recorded as well. Of course, you can't actually take a GPS reading deep in the earth where the neutrino detector actually resides.

Ars technica has a good article on all of this that is relatively easy to understand. I still haven't seen much analysis from the various physicist-skeptic blogs.


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## dinosaurdammit (Sep 23, 2011)

This thread makes me feel more stupid than I already admit to being. :C


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## ArielMT (Sep 23, 2011)

SIX said:


> As reasonable as that sounds, plate tectonics won't account for this - the neutrinos weren't fired through a rock tunnel, but an artificial built-for-purpose medium that remains the same length over its life.



Through or at?  They built a 732,000 meter conduit for this series of experiments?  According to the news story, the artificial built-for-purpose medium was the neutrino detector, the target, and the medium through which the neutrinos traveled from the source to the target was the Earth's crust.

However, after reading the abstract that the team published, they put the distance between the beam focal point and the start of the detector housing using GPS at 730,534.61 meters with a 20 cm margin of error, so it looks like that answers my question.  Edit: And that's how I missed the two posts in between.


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## M. LeRenard (Sep 23, 2011)

Aden said:


> I think they released their findings publicly for the purpose of peer review. Only inevitable that the media picks up on it; I don't think CERN "went to the media" specifically.


I guess you're right, looking back at the article.  I just always get suspicious when I hear about this kind of thing in a mainstream media publication first.
Either way, the media is doing its usual part to blow this completely out of proportion before all the results are in.  The scientists are saying, "We can't figure out where we screwed up, so we're getting help," and the media is saying (or implying through the title), "EINSTEIN WAS WRONG."



Fay V said:


> I don't think I understand relativity very well. if time slows for you the faster you go, why isn't it possible that as it hit light speed time did stop for the particles and the particle did travel the distance in that time but it appeared shorter due to the lack or time...
> 
> or wait nevermind I think I got it backwards. that would make it so time sped up for the particles so essentially the rest of the world slowed. So the particles aged and we didn't...fuck physics man >.<


Time doesn't slow for you.  It stays the same for you, but it's perceived to be going at a different rate from other frames of reference (not yours).

So people get why this is a big deal, let's just do some basic ass algebra.  In regular physics, momentum is p=mv.  Relativistic, though, goes by a Lorentz transform (don't worry about why or what that means), so it's:
p=mv/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)
m here is the 'rest mass', the mass of the particle when it's at rest (i.e., no other energy but mass).
So plug in c for v.  
mv/sqrt(1-c^2/c^2) = mv/sqrt(1-1)= mv/0
Whoops!  We divided by zero.  The equation just exploded into nonsense, and we ended up with infinite momentum.
That equation's held up under over 100 years of scrutiny, so obviously people are going to imagine they screwed up if they measured velocity for a neutrino to be greater than the speed of light.  If it turns out to be true, apparently we're missing some term in these equations for really small masses or something, and we have to adjust the whole thing for yet another realm we didn't look into closely enough.
BUT, that ain't what these scientists are saying yet.  It's generally better to assume you fucked up than to try rewriting physics every time you happen to make a measurement that's a little bit off from theory.  Because the real world is never as pretty as theory, and sometimes we forget to take crap into account.


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## ArielMT (Sep 23, 2011)

The Sci-Fi Channel (or whatever they're called now) is already rushing a made-for-cable movie about a "scientific discovery" proving FTL matter transference leading to three governments' secret developments of a warp drive engine in order to prevent alien invasion threats and inevitably leading to alien enslavement, alien annihilation, or (the most likely outcome) self-annihilation by a mystery-particle catastrophe.  I just know it.  The discovery was announced just yesterday, and the TV exec heading this up is probably reviewing the screenplay's final draft right now.


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## Tycho (Sep 23, 2011)

ArielMT said:


> The Sci-Fi Channel (or whatever they're called now) is already rushing a made-for-cable movie about a "scientific discovery" proving FTL matter transference leading to three governments' secret developments of a warp drive engine in order to prevent alien invasion threats and inevitably leading to alien enslavement, alien annihilation, or (the most likely outcome) self-annihilation by a mystery-particle catastrophe.  I just know it.  The discovery was announced just yesterday, and the TV exec heading this up is probably reviewing the screenplay's final draft right now.



The Sci-Fi (SyFy? REALLY?) Channel's not even really alive.  It's the twitching corpse of a TV network.  It would be best if it got canned.  I mean, when I can honestly say "I would rather watch Spike", that's really really terrible.


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## Sar (Sep 23, 2011)

Stratto the Hawk said:


> I have never seen someone do this, but shouldn't that be 3.00e8? Or alternatively 3.00*10^8?


Everyone has diffent ways of writing exponentials, It can also be:

0.0000003x10[SUP]15[/SUP] ms[SUP]-1[/SUP]
0.0003x10[SUP]12[/SUP] ms[SUP]-1[/SUP]
0.3x10[SUP]9[/SUP] ms[SUP]-1[/SUP]
3x10[SUP]8[/SUP] ms[SUP]-1[/SUP]
300x10[SUP]6[/SUP] ms[SUP]-1[/SUP]
300,000x10[SUP]3[/SUP] ms[SUP]-1[/SUP]
300,000,000 ms[SUP]-1[/SUP]

/pedantic


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## Kamatz (Sep 23, 2011)

ArielMT said:


> The Sci-Fi Channel (or whatever they're called now) is already rushing a made-for-cable movie about a "scientific discovery" proving FTL matter transference leading to three governments' secret developments of a warp drive engine in order to prevent alien invasion threats and inevitably leading to alien enslavement, alien annihilation, or (the most likely outcome) self-annihilation by a mystery-particle catastrophe.  I just know it.  The discovery was announced just yesterday, and the TV exec heading this up is probably reviewing the screenplay's final draft right now.



Sounds like they're making Half Life the TV show. I'm sure Valve will make a killing on TV ads for hats.


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## CannonFodder (Sep 23, 2011)

Tycho said:


> Calibrate your deflector dish to emit a pulsing phased charge of tetrion energy.


 Wait no, I use tetrion energy to *KABOOM!* ...power my microwave... there goes my popcorn.


dinosaurdammit said:


> This thread makes me feel more stupid than I already admit to being. :C


Basically they used to believe that nothing can go faster than light, because of how little mass light has.
So really the most likely reasons why neutrinos can go faster than light is-
1)Somebody fucked up with the equipment really really badly and is probably about to get fired
2)Somebody fucked up calculating the mass of light
3)Somebody fucked up calculating the mass of neutrinos
4)Einstein fucked up relativity from the very get go
5)No matter how much time someone spends attempting to do so, they'll never be as big of a troll as neutrinos
6)String Theorists fucked up
7)Particles really can go faster than the speed of light.
and a million different other possible answers, my guess is that string theorists fucked up.... again.

Whatever it turns out to be I doubt they'll throw out the book on physics, just means our understanding of how the universe works got rocked and now we know more.


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## ramsay_baggins (Sep 23, 2011)

Tycho said:


> Calibrate your deflector dish to emit a pulsing phased charge of tetrion energy.



Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish

This whole thing is now going completely over my head.


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## BRN (Sep 23, 2011)

CannonFodder said:


> 6)String Theorists fucked up



String Theory is the theory that predicted tachyons in the first place. Just saying.


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## CannonFodder (Sep 23, 2011)

ramsay_baggins said:


> Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish
> 
> This whole thing is now going completely over my head.


It's pretty simple if you go drinking in a bar always hang with Neutrino, the bar tender never charges him and he's a light weight so you can take the booze handed to him once he's plastered, but don't let him get into a fight with Light cause he'll run off faster than Light and you can't.  Also don't bring your sister along otherwise he'll constantly penetrate her.
(Good god I can't believe I explained subatomic physics by using a bar fight analogy)

Actually this is pretty interesting, cause there have been signs that tachyons are created and expelled from black holes, however it was always thought to be a stupid idea cause we always thought the speed of light was the upper limit.  Now since neutrinos have been found to go faster, that may give us some insight into what happens inside a black hole now.


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## Xipoid (Sep 23, 2011)

I'd like to hear what comes out of this. Sadly, it seems stories like this just sort of vanish.


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## M. LeRenard (Sep 23, 2011)

tl/dr of my post up there:
"We can't figure out where we screwed up" =/= "Modern physics has been disproven."


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## Kyrodo (Sep 23, 2011)

This is awesome... Yeah, I'm hoping they keep this public and that this does not turn out to be a dud/hoax :/ and that other scientists attempt to reproduce the results as well as extend upon it.


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## CannonFodder (Sep 23, 2011)

M. Le Renard said:


> tl/dr of my post up there:
> "We can't figure out where we screwed up" =/= "Modern physics has been disproven."


It's going to take them a very long time to figure out where we screwed up?


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## Aden (Sep 23, 2011)

Xipoid said:


> I'd like to hear what comes out of this. Sadly, it seems stories like this just sort of vanish.



It's not like the media is going to do a followup story on how wrong they were


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## CannonFodder (Sep 23, 2011)

Aden said:


> It's not like the media is going to do a followup story on how wrong they were


I hate how the news functions, they shit post more, have less content and attention whore than my posts and FOXNews is (CannonFodder)^4.


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## Xipoid (Sep 23, 2011)

Aden said:


> It's not like the media is going to do a followup story on how wrong they were



No, but they could at least have the decency to let people know.


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## M. LeRenard (Sep 23, 2011)

Shocking, astounding stories are news.  If the follow up happens to be 'false alarm', though, that's not shocking enough to be considered news, so it doesn't get printed.  Hence... everyone loses.
I'd suggest if you want to follow this story, keep checking in on arxiv.org for follow-up papers from these guys and their collaborators.


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## Xipoid (Sep 23, 2011)

M. Le Renard said:


> Shocking, astounding stories are news.  If the follow up happens to be 'false alarm', though, that's not shocking enough to be considered news, so it doesn't get printed.  Hence... everyone loses.
> I'd suggest if you want to follow this story, keep checking in on arxiv.org for follow-up papers from these guys and their collaborators.



Yes, and I still maintain my distaste of the media. I'm not counting on anything coming out of this, but I'll poke my head in occasionally to see if someone has a more definitive word.


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## M. LeRenard (Sep 23, 2011)

The media sucks wet baloney at reporting science breakthroughs, anyway.  They'll do an hour long live broadcast of a UFO that turns out to be the planet Jupiter, but they won't bother giving but a quick blurb when someone "prints out" an organic heart with a modified Xerox and it actually starts beating.  I guess, you know, no one's ever made a summer blockbuster about gigantic advances in medicine that could save millions of lives.


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## Xipoid (Sep 23, 2011)

M. Le Renard said:


> The media sucks wet baloney at reporting science breakthroughs, anyway.  They'll do an hour long live broadcast of a UFO that turns out to be the planet Jupiter, but they won't bother giving but a quick blurb when someone "prints out" an organic heart with a modified Xerox and it actually starts beating.  I guess, you know, no one's ever made a summer blockbuster about gigantic advances in medicine that could save millions of lives.



If I ever want to feel depressed about the state of our world, I just read some news. Works every time.


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## Tycho (Sep 23, 2011)

M. Le Renard said:


> The media sucks wet baloney at reporting science breakthroughs, anyway.  They'll do an hour long live broadcast of a UFO that turns out to be the planet Jupiter, but they won't bother giving but a quick blurb when someone "prints out" an organic heart with a modified Xerox and it actually starts beating.  I guess, you know, no one's ever made a summer blockbuster about gigantic advances in medicine that could save millions of lives.



They have.  It's just that the gigantic advance in medicine that could save billions of lives always ends up being the spark for a zombie apocalypse or whatever, in those movies.




Xipoid said:


> If I ever want to feel depressed about the state of our world, I just read some news. Works every time.



Which is more depressing: the events being blathered about on the news, or the quality of the news itself and the way it reflects so poorly on journalism in general?


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## Xipoid (Sep 23, 2011)

Tycho said:


> Which is more depressing: the events being blathered about on the news, or the quality of the news itself and the way it reflects so poorly on journalism in general?



The latter. The way I see it, there is the inevitability of tragedy. It is a fact of life, and while that does not make it any less awful I cannot let myself spend negative energy fruitlessly by indulging in self-suffering and bringing no good. The news, however, is entirely under the direct control of a system that could just as easily tomorrow change if it so desired. It is a system of perpetuated poison, as I see it... like a bunch of whores out on parade to catch the biggest spender. I pity both the spender and the prostitute.


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## CannonFodder (Sep 23, 2011)

Tycho said:


> They have.  It's just that the gigantic advance in medicine that could save billions of lives always ends up being the spark for a zombie apocalypse or whatever, in those movies.
> Which is more depressing: the events being blathered about on the news, or the quality of the news itself and the way it reflects so poorly on journalism in general?


The whole idea of the zombie apocalypse is retarded in the first place, the only way even remotely something like that could happen is if there was a bacteria blocking this one chemical in your brain(I don't remember what it's called, cause I'm not a microbiologist) and even if some odd totally impossible way that completely throws out all of modern biology inhibits the chemical they wouldn't be zombies, they'd just be acting on instinct.  Meaning movie zombies are impossible, cause the only way a bacteria could inhibit higher brain function would just make the person super horny.
And that is another reason why not only does the news suck, but movie producers do not even understand the very basics of how the world works and why people that take movie science seriously are just fucking retarded.

Oh you know what's even worse, the fact that the US government gives money to news agencies to, "combat anti-american news".... fuck my life, the government is giving money to USA based news companies just so they can shove patriotism down people's throats, again fuck my life and it's no wonder why shit like how they are probably not even going to report the findings on the neutrinos to the american people.  Cause they just keep shoving quick headliners down people's throats building up hype until people freak out that way they can get more money.

If they don't atleast post the inevitable findings on the neutrinos I'm going to lose what little faith I had in them.


----------



## Lobar (Sep 24, 2011)

Stratto the Hawk said:


> I have never seen someone do this, but shouldn't that be 3.00e8? Or alternatively 3.00*10^8?



That's more precise, but not more correct.  Most precise of all would be 299,792,458 m/sec, which is the exact speed of light.


----------



## ArielMT (Sep 24, 2011)

I was only guessing about the SyFy thing.  2 was right about it, "It's old, it's tired, and it never gets any [censored in original] better."  I'm just saying it's way past predictable as well.


----------



## Tycho (Sep 24, 2011)

I'm kind of visualizing in my head the two labs as kids playing catch, indoors.  They're tossing the baseball around and all of a sudden they hit a big vase and smash it.  Then the rest of the scientific world is the mother that comes storming in and gets all hysterical over her broken vase.

It's lot funnier if you're me.


----------



## CannonFodder (Sep 24, 2011)

Tycho said:


> I'm kind of visualizing in my head the two labs as kids playing catch, indoors.  They're tossing the baseball around and all of a sudden they hit a big vase and smash it.  Then the rest of the scientific world is the mother that comes storming in and gets all hysterical over her broken vase.
> 
> It's lot funnier if you're me.


<3
It's funnier when you realize that since they publicly showed the results, they can't just shove it under the carpet and hope no one notices the difference.


----------



## Telnac (Sep 24, 2011)

I'm surprised they found it with neutrinos (since we know that neutrinos have a rest mass > 0, but theoretical FTL particles would have a rest mass of < 0), but I'm not surprised too much that they found some particle going faster than C.  They've already proved that waves can go faster than C in certain situations, something that was even shown to happen for sound!  Later, experiments with entanglement showed that the speed of quantum information exchanged between entangled particles was not only greater than C but much, *much* greater!  That opened the door to the possibility that _useful_ information may be able to transmitted faster than C too.

But so far, all of that was information (and not even useful information; we can't build a FTL communication network... yet.)  At no point were any particles going faster than light.  Now... who knows?

Exciting times!  :-D


----------



## Commiecomrade (Sep 24, 2011)

SIX said:


> In terms of sheer understanding it would put us well back to before Newtonian physics, which is disastruous. Yet progress is made in huge leaps at random moments - this sort of result could pave the way for a massive jump in scientific understanding; it's like suddenly finding a new number in a Suduko puzzle that suddenly lets you fill a hell of a lot more in.



Wow, that's actually a great analogy.

However, we cannot rule out the possibility of recording errors (this is a billionth of a second we're talking about) as well as taking into account the fact that subatomic physics is just weird; maybe the particle jumped through space a bit and cheated.


----------



## Rakuen Growlithe (Sep 24, 2011)

Lobar said:
			
		

> That's more precise, but not more correct.  Most precise of all would be 299,792,458 m/sec, which is the exact speed of light.



More accurate, not more precise. Accuracy is how close it is to the true value, precision is how repeatable it is. 
If you measure the speed of light as 1,5*10^8 m/s, 3*10^8 m/s and 4,5*10^8 m/s then your measurements are not precise but the average is accurate.
If you measure the speed of light as 1,5*10^8 m/s, 1,55*10^8 m/s and 1,52*10^8 m/s your measurements are inaccurate but much more precise.


----------



## Roose Hurro (Sep 24, 2011)

Nice... let me know when you've built an FTL starship with this knowledge.


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## BRN (Sep 24, 2011)

I was considering this at work and wondered - what would the victory condition be?

It'd be easy to disprove that the neutrinos travelled faster than c if evidence can be found of a fault or systematic error that screwed with the results. Yet I can't help but figure that even if the neutrinos travelled faster than c, the response to that claim can always be, "Well, you just didn't find the fault in the experiment, yet." 

Needless to say I really hope this situation becomes a focus of scientific experiment; at the very least for some closure.


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## Sarcastic Coffeecup (Sep 24, 2011)

Wow. Time travelling particles. Nice.


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## Lobar (Sep 24, 2011)

Rakuen Growlithe said:


> More accurate, not more precise. Accuracy is how close it is to the true value, precision is how repeatable it is.
> If you measure the speed of light as 1,5*10^8 m/s, 3*10^8 m/s and 4,5*10^8 m/s then your measurements are not precise but the average is accurate.
> If you measure the speed of light as 1,5*10^8 m/s, 1,55*10^8 m/s and 1,52*10^8 m/s your measurements are inaccurate but much more precise.


 
Strictly speaking true, but the SI definition for the length of the meter is now based on the speed of light and therefore the speed of light is now an exact figure rather than a measured one anyways.


----------



## CannonFodder (Sep 24, 2011)

Commiecomrade said:


> Wow, that's actually a great analogy.
> 
> However, we cannot rule out the possibility of recording errors (this is a billionth of a second we're talking about) as well as taking into account the fact that subatomic physics is just weird; maybe the particle jumped through space a bit and cheated.


As I said before, it's more likely someone fucked up with calculating the mass of either particle or both.


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## Spatel (Sep 24, 2011)

99.99% odds it's a measurement caused by human error. But every fiber of my being wants this to be legit.

Would it mean FTL travel? No. Unless you plan on turning your body into neutrinos, it is useless for that. But it could mean an ansible.


----------



## ArielMT (Sep 24, 2011)

Sarcastic Coffeecup said:


> Wow. Time travelling particles. Nice.



Not quite.  There's still no possible way to travel at an accelerated rate through time except into the future.  What this discovery means, if it holds up to peer review, is that the neutrinos made photons look like slowpokes instead of keepers of the speed limit.  If the universe didn't have a cosmic speed limit, then the fastest speed possible would be the entire length of the universe per instant, and that still wouldn't be time travel in the conventional sci-fi sense.

A more realistic possibility is that it means the cosmic speed limit is slightly faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, an error in our understanding of what the limit is, but still definitely a cosmic speed limit.


----------



## Fling (Sep 24, 2011)

When I first saw this topic I was like "Troll." But then I read it and was like 

Really hoping that after everyone gets a chance to scrutinize it that it still holds up just because it would be exciting for such a huge change in understanding.


----------



## Roose Hurro (Sep 25, 2011)

The mention of quantum entanglement got me to thinking... light is able to transmit information.  It may very well be impossible to send a material object (spacecraft) to another star faster than the speed of light, but what if you could build a "telescope" able to view the surface of a planet circling another star as if you'd just stepped out onto the surface of that planet?  THAT would be a valuable tech to have.


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## Ikrit (Sep 25, 2011)

the bartender says "we don't serve tachyons here"

a tachyon walks into a bar


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## Perception (Sep 25, 2011)

If this was true it would be nuts... But in a cool way. But i have a question, if these particles travel faster than light, how can they be detected because if they travel faster than light, shouldnt they only exist in the future in which case how is it possible to see them in the present? and how would you measure something that travels faster then light?


----------



## BRN (Sep 25, 2011)

Ajsforg said:


> If this was true it would be nuts... But in a cool way. But i have a question, if these particles travel faster than light, how can they be detected because if they travel faster than light, shouldnt they only exist in the future in which case how is it possible to see them in the present? and how would you measure something that travels faster then light?



If something travels faster than light, it doesn't mean it travels faster than time. Speed is distance travelled, divided by the time it took to get there; both the distance and the time were known.


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## Lobar (Sep 25, 2011)

The math on if that 20 cm margin of error is enough to account for those 60 billionths of a second:


```
0.00000006 sec * 299792458 m * 100 cm
---------------------------------- = 1798.754748 cm
.            1 sec * 1 m
```

So definitely not enough, by two orders of magnitude.  At the speed of light, we have ~18 _meters_ of distance traveled unaccounted for in that time figure.


----------



## lafeel (Sep 25, 2011)

If this is true Einstein is rolling in his grave..

From laughing his ass off. After all he probably knew just as well as anyone that he was not infallible.


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## CannonFodder (Sep 25, 2011)

lafeel said:


> If this is true Einstein is rolling in his grave..
> 
> From laughing his ass off. After all he probably knew just as well as anyone that he was not infallible.


I have to agree with this, people distorted him into some sort of science god that should never be questioned, if he was alive today he would be absolutely excited to have been wrong and about the new field of discovery.


----------



## lafeel (Sep 25, 2011)

CannonFodder said:


> I have to agree with this, people distorted him into some sort of science god that should never be questioned, if he was alive today he would be absolutely excited to have been wrong and about the new field of discovery.


Exactly. Science isn't supposed to be us blindly following what, admittedly one of the sharpest minds of the last century, one man taught us. If it turns out he was wrong, he was wrong. 

Far from throwing us back to pre Newton in understanding, this would show that we never really moved past that level of understanding.


----------



## Lobar (Sep 25, 2011)

CannonFodder said:


> I have to agree with this, people distorted him into some sort of science god that should never be questioned, if he was alive today he would be absolutely excited to have been wrong and about the new field of discovery.



They have?  Maybe laymen and the media have to some degree, but not the scientific community.  I take it you've never heard of the Einstein-Bohr debate?


----------



## CannonFodder (Sep 25, 2011)

Lobar said:


> They have?  Maybe laymen and the media have to some degree, but not the scientific community.  I take it you've never heard of the Einstein-Bohr debate?


 I meant the average person who doesn't actually understand physics has.


lafeel said:


> Exactly. Science isn't supposed to be us blindly following what, admittedly one of the sharpest minds of the last century, one man taught us. If it turns out he was wrong, he was wrong.
> Far from throwing us back to pre Newton in understanding, this would show that we never really moved past that level of understanding.


A hundred years from now the majority of what we were taught will be proven to be wrong, but that's nothing to be ashamed of that means our understanding of the world has continued to flourish and develop, rather than sitting around fooling ourselves into thinking we understand the entirety of how the universe works.


----------



## lafeel (Sep 25, 2011)

CannonFodder said:


> I meant the average person who doesn't actually understand physics has.
> 
> A hundred years from now the majority of what we were taught will be proven to be wrong, but that's nothing to be ashamed of that means our understanding of the world has continued to flourish and develop, rather than sitting around fooling ourselves into thinking we understand the entirety of how the universe works.


Aye, and people need to stop thinking that's a bad thing.


----------



## Tiger In A Tie (Sep 25, 2011)

Lobar said:


> They have?  Maybe laymen and the media have to some degree, but not the scientific community.  I take it you've never heard of the Einstein-Bohr debate?



When people think of scientific geniuses, they more often than not think of Einstein. Unfortunately some great scientists go unknown to the general public. (I know this is not the field of physics, but)-Rosalind Franklin, for example. Hell, Watson and Crick used some of her work and ended up getting a lot of the credit for what started with that woman's discovery, and I bet a few people know who those two are but don't know much about Rosalind Franklin's original findings.

So many scientists don't get the recognition they deserve. Not saying Einstein didn't deserve it, but I think people should learn more about the scientists that shaped our [current] knowledge.


----------



## Telnac (Sep 26, 2011)

Just to be clear: traveling faster than light is only one part of what's necessary to go back in time.  Your destination also has to be moving at a high rate of speed (near the speed of light) relative to your origin.  Because time at your destination is moving more slowly relative to your origin, the clock at your destination says you've arrived earlier than the clock at your origin.  If you reversed course and went FTL back to the origin, you would arrive there before you began your journey.

Since we don't have any spacecraft traveling at 99% of the speed of light, the only way we could travel into the human past (even if we could build an FTL transportation system today) would be to travel all the way to the edge of the observable Universe... 13.7 _billion_ light years away, and back.  I doubt you'd get many volunteers for that trip!


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## ArielMT (Sep 26, 2011)

Telnac said:


> Just to be clear: traveling faster than light is only one part of what's necessary to go back in time.  Your destination also has to be moving at a high rate of speed (near the speed of light) relative to your origin.  Because time at your destination is moving more slowly relative to your origin, the clock at your destination says you've arrived earlier than the clock at your origin.  If you reversed course and went FTL back to the origin, you would arrive there before you began your journey.



That's not how FTL travel would work, assuming it would work at all.  The flow of time is always into the future, never into the past, no matter how slowly time flows.  Time can never reverse.


----------



## Tycho (Sep 26, 2011)

ArielMT said:


> That's not how FTL travel would work, assuming it would work at all.  The flow of time is always into the future, never into the past, no matter how slowly time flows.  Time can never reverse.



And particles with positive mass can't exceed the speed of light.

Oh, wait.

back to the drawing board!


----------



## Roose Hurro (Sep 26, 2011)

ArielMT said:


> That's not how FTL travel would work, assuming it would work at all.  The flow of time is always into the future, never into the past, no matter how slowly time flows.  *Time can never reverse.*



Blasted Langoliers!


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## ArielMT (Sep 26, 2011)

Tycho said:


> And particles with positive mass can't exceed the speed of light.
> 
> Oh, wait.
> 
> back to the drawing board!



When last I checked, we and all our vehicles were composed of particles of matter with positive mass, and we're presently unable to imagine vehicles able to carry particles with positive mass which aren't themselves also composed of particles with positive mass.

That's irrelevant to time travel, anyway.  The only way back in time that's even playfully theoretical is through the expansion of a wormhole, but one the size of any particle of matter-energy can't survive because what enters in the future and leaves in the past would enter a feedback loop and destroy itself the wormhole.  My admittedly casual understanding of how time works comes from books written by, among others, Stephen Hawking.


----------



## Aden (Sep 26, 2011)

ITT: people take positions on subjects that nobody knows anything about outside of sci-fi novels


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## Tycho (Sep 26, 2011)

Aden said:


> ITT: people take positions on subjects that nobody knows anything about outside of sci-fi novels



Neutrinos go faster than light

can't explain that!


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## Telnac (Sep 26, 2011)

ArielMT said:


> That's not how FTL travel would work, assuming it  would work at all.  The flow of time is always into the future, never  into the past, no matter how slowly time flows.  Time can never  reverse.


Uh... not according to my physics professor when we  discussed this very topic.  Because time is relative, it's possible for  two frames of reference to have different local times (assuming, of  course, they're traveling nearly at the speed of light with respect to  each other or if one of them's in an immense gravity well so that the  difference can be measured.)  Any traveler going from one to the other  slower than or at the speed of light will always arrive at their destination at a local time greater than the time they left.  If you can't exceed C, time travel can't happen.  But if you can go faster than light, then you can arrive at your destination where the local time is earlier than the time you left.  In such a situation, the arrow of time can be reversed and nasty things like paradoxes can happen (unless there's some mechanism to prevent them or if we're in a multiverse where "time travel" is really going from reality to another.)

We've never observed anything going backwards in time, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible.  Until now, we've never observed anything going faster than light, either.  (Assuming this isn't refuted, of course.)

The only way for the principle of causality to hold is if it's 100% impossible for anything to go faster than light.



Tycho said:


> And particles with positive mass can't exceed the speed of light.


That's what this experiment, if verified, has supposedly disproven.  Neutrinos have a rest mass greater than zero (we already know this) so if they're ever exceeding C... then situations like what I described above can theoretically happen!


----------



## Xaerun (Sep 26, 2011)

Tycho said:


> Neutrinos go faster than light
> 
> can't explain that!



Aliens



Cyril said:


> So my physics teacher may have LIED to me?
> 
> Interested to see what happens next though, especially if they can recreate what happened.


I'll sue my physics teacher, I'll sue the department of education, I'll sue the city of Melbourne, I'll sue you, the state, and I'll sue the entire country of Australia!


----------



## CannonFodder (Sep 26, 2011)

Tycho said:


> Neutrinos go faster than light
> 
> can't explain that!


Really can't actually.


----------



## Tycho (Sep 26, 2011)

I seriously wonder if perhaps neutrinos possess some other odd characteristic (besides low mass, weak interaction) that we haven't discovered yet - one that lets them do this.  How do you GET a neutrino, to start with?


----------



## CannonFodder (Sep 26, 2011)

Tycho said:


> I seriously wonder if perhaps neutrinos possess some other odd characteristic (besides low mass, weak interaction) that we haven't discovered yet - one that lets them do this.  How do you GET a neutrino, to start with?


Nuclear decay.
Whatever is the cause of them going faster than the speed of light, it's going to be awesome to learn about it.


----------



## Telnac (Sep 26, 2011)

CannonFodder said:


> Nuclear decay.
> Whatever is the cause of them going faster than the speed of light, it's going to be awesome to learn about it.


My money's on some quirk of quantum mechanics.


----------



## Gryphoneer (Sep 26, 2011)

Measuring error.

But xkcd puts the current situation better.


----------



## BRN (Nov 18, 2011)

You know, for some time I'd begun to fear that this really would just drop off the charts and I'd never hear a resolution.

But CERN just middlefingered Einstein again.


----------



## LizardKing (Nov 18, 2011)

Science: The never-ending mindfuck. 

There's a bit more here as well.


----------



## M. LeRenard (Nov 18, 2011)

They repeated it at CERN?  I didn't think they had the proper equipment there.
Either way, sounds like it's something to take pretty seriously at this point, if someone else got the same result.  What we'll get here, I guess, is either new physics (cool!) or a realization of something that's been contaminating results that they've so far failed to take into account (not as cool, but still useful).  I suspect in a few months we'll get a more definitive explanation.  Or if it's new physics, it'll probably be more like 10 years.


----------



## Sarcastic Coffeecup (Nov 18, 2011)

I wonder what real world applications this invention will bring


----------



## ArielMT (Nov 18, 2011)

Sarcastic Coffeecup said:


> I wonder what real world applications this invention will bring



It's a discovery, not an invention.

If it holds up to peer review, then the cosmic speed limit will be revised above the speed of light.  For practical concerns, it'll allow us to be far more precise where small differences have large consequences (such as the GPS clock drift caused by the satellites' distance from the Earth, or microminiature circuitry), and it could refine our understanding of the universe's origin and fate.

We still won't have FTL technologies like ansibles and warp drives unless this discovery leads to the discovery of particles traveling significantly faster than light.  These neutrinos only traveled slightly faster.


----------



## Kinuki (Nov 18, 2011)

M. Le Renard said:


> They repeated it at CERN?  I didn't think they had the proper equipment there.


They  repeated the experiment at the original site of the findings, the  Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in, well, Gran Sasso, Italy. CERN is  located in Geneva, Switzerland and collaborates in the OPERA project by  providing the beam of muon neutrinos they measure at Gran Sasso.

The most recent test series uses differently pulsed beams to measure the flight time of the particles more accurately.

I  wouldn't hold my breath for the complete refutation of Einstein's  relativity theory, though. The absolute speed of light is way too  fundamental and observable in everyday life - the calculations behind  GPS are based on c. Either the source of error is very subtle/tricky or  it's an exceptional phenomenon enabled by something non-intuitive like,  say, subatomic wormholes. Since RT is an approximation there's room for  such effects.



Sarcastic Coffeecup said:


> I wonder what real world applications this invention will bring


The particles traveled only roughly 0.0002% faster than c, so no FTL radio anytime soon.


----------



## BRN (Nov 18, 2011)

If I can just clarify, apparently the muons weren't moving faster than the academically evaluated speed of light - they were moving faster than light itself. 

Now, I was thinking about the time dilation factor... which is measured as '1, divided by the the root of (1 - [ speed^2 / c^2 ])'.

Two principle facts really stand out. Firstly, while it's clear that as "speed" gets higher, the time dilation factor increases. Yet, if "speed" = c, then the time dilation factor is measured as '1 divided by (0)'. Never was really able to make sense of this.

Secondly, if "speed" > c, then the time dilation factor becomes '1 divided by the root of (a negative number)', which evokes the imaginary number "i" multipled by a constant based on the speed. This, too, I can't make sense of, as "i" is a purely theoretical 'number' that adds a y-dimension to the one-dimensional number-line. 

However, it does almost make sense to say that the speed of an object might be (x + yi)... even if y is just 0 for relativistic speeds.


----------



## Azure (Nov 18, 2011)

I thought this thread was about Nigerian sprinting champions.


----------



## M. LeRenard (Nov 18, 2011)

Kinuki said:


> They  repeated the experiment at the original site of the findings, the  Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in, well, Gran Sasso, Italy. CERN is  located in Geneva, Switzerland and collaborates in the OPERA project by  providing the beam of muon neutrinos they measure at Gran Sasso.
> 
> The most recent test series uses differently pulsed beams to measure the flight time of the particles more accurately.


Okay, gotcha.
I know there's another similar project going on in... Japan, I think, where they could potentially attempt to recreate this as well.  If it happens there too, we'll be in serious business.



> The particles traveled only roughly 0.0002% faster than c, so no FTL radio anytime soon.


Communication via neutrinos... there's a thought.  Our TV stations generating the signal would be consuming so much energy the whole planet would be blacking out every millisecond, and we'd have gigantic subterranean tanks of water as receiver antennae.  And then the final real-time image would look like a dot flickering randomly in and out of existence on an otherwise black monitor.


----------



## Roose Hurro (Nov 18, 2011)

ArielMT said:


> It's a discovery, not an invention.
> 
> If it holds up to peer review, then the cosmic speed limit will be revised above the speed of light.  For practical concerns, it'll allow us to be far more precise where small differences have large consequences (such as the GPS clock drift caused by the satellites' distance from the Earth, or microminiature circuitry), and it could refine our understanding of the universe's origin and fate.
> 
> We still won't have FTL technologies like ansibles and warp drives unless this discovery leads to the discovery of particles traveling significantly faster than light.  *These neutrinos only traveled slightly faster.*



Still, if it checks out as real, it means the speed of light is no longer a limit.  Oh, and I found this interesting:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15788735


----------



## Rakuen Growlithe (Nov 20, 2011)

Nice, easy-to-read piece explaining why things shouldn't be able to move faster than light, some possible ways it might happen and what's still wrong with the experiment. Also the poster will eat his boxer shorts on live TV if the experiment is proved to be correct and neutrinos move faster than light.
http://www.jimal-khalili.com/blog/faster-than-the-speed-of-light.html


----------



## Dragonfurry (Nov 20, 2011)

I personally would love to see this discovery go into making time travel possible.


----------



## BRN (Nov 20, 2011)

Rakuen Growlithe said:


> Nice, easy-to-read piece explaining why things shouldn't be able to move faster than light, some possible ways it might happen and what's still wrong with the experiment. Also the poster will eat his boxer shorts on live TV if the experiment is proved to be correct and neutrinos move faster than light.
> http://www.jimal-khalili.com/blog/faster-than-the-speed-of-light.html



 To be honest, that piece is seeming to say "There's still possible sources of error, and relativity is just too important to prove wrong so I'm not going to even allow credibility to these results". Falling back on the _applicability _of relativity as a justification for believing relativity really isn't what a physicist should do. There shouldn't be passion in science. =s



Dragonfurry said:


> I personally would love to see this discovery go into making time travel possible.


 
Time travel is scary. I'd like to see instantaneous travel through space [think Stargate]. :v


----------



## Rakuen Growlithe (Nov 20, 2011)

SIX said:
			
		

> Falling back on the _applicability _of relativity as a justification for believing relativity really isn't what a physicist should do.



How do you figure that? If relativity weren't applicable then that would suggest it is wrong. Seeing as when you use relativity you get the correct predictions suggests that relativity is correct, because otherwise it shouldn't be useful.


----------



## M. LeRenard (Nov 20, 2011)

To be clear, here, we _know_ relativity is correct _because_ we've had to incorporate it into technological applications.  If this neutrino thing turns out to be true, our GPS systems aren't suddenly going to stop working.  Fact is, GR and SR are based entirely on the premise that the speed of light is constant from all frames of reference.  If you don't do that, the math doesn't work.  But the math does work, and we see it happen in real life.
So if this does turn out to be true, it only means we'll have to come up with an explanation for it outside of general relativity, i.e. modify GR somehow to take into account, say... extra dimensions, other universes, things like that.  In other words, take it into the next realm, just as relativity took Newtonian mechanics into the realm of motion near the speed of light considering the constancy of said speed based on Maxwell's equations.  So we'll have the zeroth order explanation from Newton, then the 1st order from Einstein, and now maybe a 2nd order taking into account this neutrino phenomenon.
Assuming, of course, that it isn't just experimental error.  These kinds of measurements are extremely sensitive, after all.


----------



## BRN (Nov 20, 2011)

Rakuen Growlithe said:


> How do you figure that? If relativity weren't applicable then that would suggest it is wrong. Seeing as when you use relativity you get the correct predictions suggests that relativity is correct, because otherwise it shouldn't be useful.



I agree that it's useful, and I agree that the theory can be applied. But useing that applicability to say that it must be *the* correct theory and working backwards from the assumption to the conclusion that the experiment is wrong... that's arguably a perspective of infallibility. Any physicist should accept that even the most likely theory can be proved to be in need of maintenance.



M. Le Renard said:


> To be clear, here, we _know_ relativity is correct _because_ we've had to incorporate it into technological applications.  If this neutrino thing turns out to be true, our GPS systems aren't suddenly going to stop working.  Fact is, GR and SR are based entirely on the premise that the speed of light is constant from all frames of reference.  If you don't do that, the math doesn't work.  But the math does work, and we see it happen in real life.
> So if this does turn out to be true, it only means we'll have to come up with an explanation for it outside of general relativity, i.e. modify GR somehow to take into account, say... extra dimensions, other universes, things like that.  In other words, take it into the next realm, just as relativity took Newtonian mechanics into the realm of motion near the speed of light considering the constancy of said speed based on Maxwell's equations.  So we'll have the zeroth order explanation from Newton, then the 1st order from Einstein, and now maybe a 2nd order taking into account this neutrino phenomenon.
> Assuming, of course, that it isn't just experimental error.  These kinds of measurements are extremely sensitive, after all.



I've always been impressed by the men of history in physics. As of yet I've been able to utilise physics in everyday life, but to literally work with and rearrange the unknown into coherence is an impossible task for me - the jump from classical physics to relativity is immense; what kind of task would it be to rearrange into a third coherence the idea of FTL? Exciting and horrifying times.


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## Onnes (Nov 20, 2011)

SIX said:


> If I can just clarify, apparently the muons weren't moving faster than the academically evaluated speed of light - they were moving faster than light itself.
> 
> Now, I was thinking about the time dilation factor... which is measured as '1, divided by the the root of (1 - [ speed^2 / c^2 ])'.
> 
> Two principle facts really stand out. Firstly, while it's clear that as "speed" gets higher, the time dilation factor increases. Yet, if "speed" = c, then the time dilation factor is measured as '1 divided by (0)'. Never was really able to make sense of this.



The thing about photons is that they have no inertial rest frame, and this is a direct consequence of their invariant speed. Without that rest frame, all of the standard equations about length contraction and time dilation become meaningless. You can come to the idea that photons are "timeless" by taking the limit of inertial frames with relative velocity v->c, however relative to the photon itself time simply cannot be defined in the same manner as for a massive particle.


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## Telnac (Nov 20, 2011)

This is a very exciting time to be a scientist.  I don't know why people are saying "this proves that scientists don't know what they're talking about."  Science is the process of discovery.  Experiments that validate a hypothesis are good, but experiments that cast doubt on long-held beliefs are *great*... assuming they can be independently reproduced and verified!  The neutrino experiment can be reproduced... but so far, it's only been reproduced by the same set of scientists.  CERN isn't the only accelerator that can produce a beam of neutrinos.  I can't wait to see if another accelerator & detector combo can reproduce the results of this experiment.  If they can, a whole new chapter in our understanding of the Universe may be written!

This is different than the experiments about sending information faster than light.  Anything with a mass > 0 but going faster than light would violate everything we know about relativity.  The experiments showing that information could go faster than light didn't violate anything, although they seriously cast doubt on the concept of causality (which some believe is a universal law, but is a concept I've never believed in.)  Causality falls out of the fact that if nothing (including information) could exceed the speed of light, then there is no way anything could travel back in time.  The moment anything goes faster than light, then time travel becomes possible.  Yet we've never seen any evidence of any thing going backwards in time.  So is causality real or not?  We don't know.  Stay tuned.

What's exciting about this is that, if verified, it may open up the possibility of not just faster than light communication, but FTL space travel as well.  No, it's not a warp drive, but if neutrinos have positive mass and can go faster than light, then maybe people can too.  If some neutrinos end up having _negative_ mass (which is one theory as to how this can happen), than that opens up the possibility of harnessing negative energy... which is the key stumbling block to building a warp drive.  We may be centuries away from building one, but if this experiment can be verified, then it would mean that something like the warp drive may just be possible.


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## Dragonfurry (Nov 20, 2011)

Telnac said:


> This is a very exciting time to be a scientist.  I don't know why people are saying "this proves that scientists don't know what they're talking about."  Science is the process of discovery.  Experiments that validate a hypothesis are good, but experiments that cast doubt on long-held beliefs are *great*... assuming they can be independently reproduced and verified!  The neutrino experiment can be reproduced... but so far, it's only been reproduced by the same set of scientists.  CERN isn't the only accelerator that can produce a beam of neutrinos.  I can't wait to see if another accelerator & detector combo can reproduce the results of this experiment.  If they can, a whole new chapter in our understanding of the Universe may be written!
> 
> This is different than the experiments about sending information faster than light.  Anything with a mass > 0 but going faster than light would violate everything we know about relativity.  The experiments showing that information could go faster than light didn't violate anything, although they seriously cast doubt on the concept of causality (which some believe is a universal law, but is a concept I've never believed in.)  Causality falls out of the fact that if nothing (including information) could exceed the speed of light, then there is no way anything could travel back in time.  The moment anything goes faster than light, then time travel becomes possible.  Yet we've never seen any evidence of any thing going backwards in time.  So is causality real or not?  We don't know.  Stay tuned.
> 
> What's exciting about this is that, if verified, it may open up the possibility of not just faster than light communication, but FTL space travel as well.  No, it's not a warp drive, but if neutrinos have positive mass and can go faster than light, then maybe people can too.  If some neutrinos end up having _negative_ mass (which is one theory as to how this can happen), than that opens up the possibility of harnessing negative energy... which is the key stumbling block to building a warp drive.  We may be centuries away from building one, but if this experiment can be verified, then it would mean that something like the warp drive may just be possible.



I would love to have warp drive so I could travel to that planet i heard of that is very similar to Earth. People if this discovery is completely verified we migh go into a Star Wars age in the future.


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## CannonFodder (Nov 20, 2011)

SIX said:


> I agree that it's useful, and I agree that the theory can be applied. But useing that applicability to say that it must be *the* correct theory and working backwards from the assumption to the conclusion that the experiment is wrong... that's arguably a perspective of infallibility. Any physicist should accept that even the most likely theory can be proved to be in need of maintenance.
> 
> 
> 
> I've always been impressed by the men of history in physics. As of yet I've been able to utilise physics in everyday life, but to literally work with and rearrange the unknown into coherence is an impossible task for me - the jump from classical physics to relativity is immense; what kind of task would it be to rearrange into a third coherence the idea of FTL? Exciting and horrifying times.


Hate to burst your bubble Six, FTL isn't going to be here for hundreds of thousands of years.  It's one thing to have neutrinos go faster than light, it's a whole other thing to send a entire spaceship into FTL.


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## Telnac (Nov 20, 2011)

CannonFodder said:


> Hate to burst your bubble Six, FTL isn't going to be here for hundreds of thousands of years.  It's one thing to have neutrinos go faster than light, it's a whole other thing to send a entire spaceship into FTL.


Well, even if FTL spaceships are a long way off, it'll be exciting too see if this discrepancy allows us to better understand the laws of physics that would eventually allow such a device to be built.  Isaac Newton never lived to see the Apollo program, but he all but gave us the first draft of the Saturn V's blueprint when he wrote his _Principia_ nearly 250 years before any space-faring rockets were built.


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## Kinuki (Nov 21, 2011)

Then again, if this turns out to be a real thing and not just a measurement error no one can predict how this discovery will influence scientific progress. One of the best examples is blackbody radiation. In its day dismissed as an irrelevant phenomenon and without any real-world application, its study led to quantum mechanics. Modern electronics would be unthinkable without these principles.


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## CAThulu (Nov 21, 2011)

Ikrit said:


> the bartender says "we don't serve tachyons here"
> 
> a tachyon walks into a bar



*LOL*  I love that one ^_^


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## BRN (Nov 21, 2011)

CannonFodder said:


> Hate to burst your bubble Six, FTL isn't going to be here for hundreds of thousands of years.  It's one thing to have neutrinos go faster than light, it's a whole other thing to send a entire spaceship into FTL.


I didn't mention spaceships, or even travel... it's the very idea of FTL that would need to be reconciled with modern physics. Relativity makes it impossible for an object to accellerate to a speed faster than light and also forbid tachyons - so these neutrinos have the power to reshape our understand our physics into a new 'coherence'.


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## BRN (Nov 22, 2011)

Bump; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15830844

Results have been queried after further experimentation. An expected 'significant deformation of the neutrino energy spectrum' and 'abundant production of photons and electron pairs' - apparently, a method of losing energy until the object would slow to _c_ - both appeared to be entirely missing. According to the scientists who proposed this, the findings are consistent with _subliminal_ travel. They're waiting on other experiments from other labs to perform the neutrino experiment before making any conclusions.


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## Roose Hurro (Nov 22, 2011)

Another possibility I've heard of is that the speed of light (and other such physical constants) may actually be changing over time, so, it may be possible the speed of light has actually crept up a bit over the last 100 years.  Also, I'd be curious as to the geology present along the path of the beam, but yes, until we have further experiments performed elsewhere, we still can't be sure what the problem is.  It's quite possible, if the neutrinos are shedding energy, the byproducts might not be reaching the detector... again, a wild speculation.  Something has to be responsible for the variation.


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## CannonFodder (Nov 22, 2011)

Roose Hurro said:


> Another possibility I've heard of is that the speed of light (and other such physical constants) may actually be changing over time,


Look up the horizon problem.


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## Telnac (Nov 22, 2011)

SIX said:


> Bump; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15830844
> 
> Results have been queried after further experimentation. An expected 'significant deformation of the neutrino energy spectrum' and 'abundant production of photons and electron pairs' - apparently, a method of losing energy until the object would slow to _c_ - both appeared to be entirely missing. According to the scientists who proposed this, the findings are consistent with _subliminal_ travel. They're waiting on other experiments from other labs to perform the neutrino experiment before making any conclusions.


I dunno, from my understanding of relativity, anything with a mass > 0 going at light speed (much less faster than light) would already have infinite mass.  Shedding mass/energy (since there're really the same thing) wouldn't slow the particle to _c_, because it would have to shed more mass than the entire Universe to accomplish that.  All the findings show is that the neutrinos didn't appear to be shedding mass, and obviously weren't infinite mass: findings that fly in the face of theory.  While the simpler explanation is that the particles were going slower than _c_ and there's a measurement error somehow, the fact that the energy spectrum doesn't show them losing mass isn't proof of that.

But they are 100% correct in saying they need to wait for other labs to try to reproduce this result before coming to any conclusions.  If it can be reproduced elsewhere and we eliminate all possible explanations for a measuring error, then these findings would stand... even if they do fly in the face with well-tested theories about relativity.  Then the real head-scratching begins!


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## Roose Hurro (Nov 22, 2011)

CannonFodder said:


> Look up the horizon problem.



Found this at the end of the Wiki:



> Inflationary theory allows for a solution to the problem (along with several others such as the flatness problem) by positing a short 10 âˆ’ 32 second period of exponential expansion (dubbed "inflation") within the first minute or so of the history of the universe. During inflation, the universe would have increased in size by an enormous factor.
> 
> If correct, inflation solves the horizon problem by suggesting that prior to the inflationary period the entire universe was causally connected, and it was during this period that the physical properties evened out. Inflation then expanded it rapidly, freezing in these properties all over the sky; at this point the universe would be forced to be almost perfectly homogeneous, as the information needed to change it from that state was no longer causally connected. In the modern era distant areas in the sky appear to be unconnected causally, but in fact were much closer together in the past.
> 
> One consequence of cosmic inflation is that the anisotropies in the Big Bang are reduced but not entirely eliminated. Differences in the temperature of the cosmic background are smoothed by cosmic inflation, but they still exist. The theory predicts a spectrum for the anisotropies in the microwave background which is mostly[2] consistent with observations from WMAP and COBE.


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## LizardKing (Feb 22, 2012)

So it turns out all that fuss is probably nothing more than a faulty cable.


> According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos' flight and an electronic card in a computer. After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fiber, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed.



They'll need to test it again after correcting this, but I doubt it'll do anything more than confirm that the cable was the problem. Anyone lost any bets?

(Also this is exactly 3 months after the last post (at least where I am). Borderline necro go)


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## Gryphoneer (Feb 22, 2012)

Occam's Razor wins yet again.


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## Bleedswhitefire (Feb 22, 2012)

So how much longer before light speed becomes the speed limit? Wonder how hard it would be to go faster then that.


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## ArielMT (Feb 22, 2012)

Thread kept open because it's entirely relevant and perfectly on topic.



Bubba Jay said:


> So how much longer before light speed becomes the speed limit? Wonder how hard it would be to go faster then that.



It already is in parts of Montana.  As for the rest of the nation, that probably won't happen anytime soon.  Heck, it took them how many decades to raise the speed limit above 55 MPH.

As for going faster, it's pretty straightforward.  All you need is a greater amount of energy than exists in the entire universe.


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## CannonFodder (Feb 22, 2012)

ArielMT said:


> As for going faster, it's pretty straightforward.  All you need is a greater amount of energy than exists in the entire universe.


Or a magnet strong enough to warp space


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## Onnes (Feb 22, 2012)

The speed of light is very much a hard limit for information transmission in accepted physics. To break it you have to turn to speculative theories and generally overlook those aspects which would otherwise break reality.


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## Roose Hurro (Feb 23, 2012)

Bubba Jay said:


> So how much longer before light speed becomes the speed limit? *Wonder how hard it would be to go faster then that.*



Not that hard, if you can find a way to shorten the distance between two points to zero.  That way, you could travel wherever you want in the universe without exceeding the speed of light... or needing a million years to get there.


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## Metalmeerkat (Feb 23, 2012)

Onnes said:


> The speed of light is very much a hard limit for information transmission in accepted physics. To break it you have to turn to speculative theories and generally overlook those aspects which would otherwise break reality.



It has been shown experimentally that it isn't a hard limit; bad news has been documented as traveling as fast as roughly 40c, Â±2c.


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## Gryphoneer (Feb 23, 2012)

We wait some thousand (or million) years till the physics and energy consumption are sorted out and an Alcubierre metric-derived warp drive becomes feasible.

Or wait how all those new findings in the field of symmetry breaking turn out and see if we can "shift" from its tardyonic to a tachyonic form.


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## Commiecomrade (Feb 23, 2012)

Roose Hurro said:


> Not that hard, if you can find a way to shorten the distance between two points to zero.  That way, you could travel wherever you want in the universe without exceeding the speed of light... or needing a million years to get there.


I'd imagine that would take way too much energy to be feasible.

Maybe you could pull a Futurama and just _make the whole universe move behind you_. Things might not be able to travel faster than light, but space has no mass.

Also, DAMMIT SCIENTISTS! Stop making mistakes!


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## Metalmeerkat (Feb 23, 2012)

It'd be much easier and cheaper to just not think so badly of the time it'd take to get from point A to point B. Hell, machines and embryos wouldn't bother to care at all.

Wait, that involves patience. Scratch that, millennial-tech warpdrives it is.


ETA:


> but space has no mass.


Does it? I thought space is a false vacuum.


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## BRN (Feb 23, 2012)

Gryphoneer said:


> We wait some thousand (or million) years till the physics and energy consumption are sorted out and an Alcubierre metric-derived warp drive becomes feasible.
> 
> Or wait how all those new findings in the field of symmetry breaking turn out and see if we can "shift" from its tardyonic to a tachyonic form.



Ok, let me lay this out. The Alcubierre bridge is a hypothetical concept. Matter has mass, like 2kg. There's debate about whether matter could have -2kg mass. The 'exotic matter' referred to in the Alcuvierre bridge is a weasel statement which means 'hey, maybe if we find matter more bizarre than anything ever, it might happen to have useful properties!' That's where they want you to think of strange matter of masses like (-4 + e_i_)kg.

And you can't just 'sort out' the hard limits of the energy required. :u

Ed: but this news is really sad


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## Roose Hurro (Feb 23, 2012)

Yeah, bummer... but I do believe someone mentioned it could have been an error of some sort.  Just turns out it was.  Shame, I was hoping for some excitement.


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## BRN (Feb 23, 2012)

Oh, _hello..._



			
				BBC News said:
			
		

> The two problems the team has identified would have opposing effects on the apparent speed.
> 
> On the one hand, the team said there is a problem in the "oscillator" that provides a ticking clock to the experiment in the intervals between the synchronisations of GPS equipment. This is used to provide start and stop times for the measurement as well as precise distance information.
> 
> ...


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## Aden (Feb 23, 2012)

I'm still holding out for other organizations to carry out their own instances of this experiment


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## Ikrit (Feb 23, 2012)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XjS4I4oQDY

this should help explain it


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## Lobar (Feb 23, 2012)

Commiecomrade said:


> Maybe you could pull a Futurama and just _make the whole universe move behind you_. Things might not be able to travel faster than light, but space has no mass.



Move the universe?  What would you move it _through_?



Commiecomrade said:


> Also, DAMMIT SCIENTISTS! Stop making mistakes!



But that's how we learn!


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## Dragonfurry (Feb 23, 2012)

Commiecomrade said:


> I'd imagine that would take way too much energy to be feasible.
> 
> Maybe you could pull a Futurama and just _make the whole universe move behind you_. Things might not be able to travel faster than light, but space has no mass.



How do you move something that has no mass?


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## Metalmeerkat (Feb 23, 2012)

Gravity? Spinning black holes can cause space around it to spin IIRC. I don't know, relativity is weird.


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## CannonFodder (Feb 23, 2012)

Dragonfurry said:


> How do you move something that has no mass?


Space is the lack of matter.

Then again it's possible that space is actually a unstable vacuum, cause it would explain so much about how the universe started.


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## BRN (Feb 23, 2012)

Dragonfurry said:


> How do you move something that has no mass?




Z.P.E, e=mc^2, maybe. But all movement is relative anyway.

Moving space is the same as moving everything else around it.


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