# Ye cannae change the laws of physics



## PTeppic (Sep 22, 2011)

Notwithstanding systematic errors, the LHC at CERN may have inadvertently transmitted neutrinos slightly faster than the speed of light...

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


----------



## chrispenycate (Sep 22, 2011)

Just what I needed. A whole batch of second-hand trinoes going on holiday to Italy just under my feet, and do they respect the speed limit? It's not as if it takes them that long to get there at 300,000 kM/sec. (Now, parking when they get there, that's a whole different kettle of spaghetti).


----------



## AnyaKimlin (Sep 22, 2011)

It has been an interesting week scientifically - there has also been a new species of sparrow found.  (my son is bird obsessed).


----------



## RJM Corbet (Sep 22, 2011)

Wow! Of all the things that could send the physics model completely back to the drawing board, it turns out to be the humble, innocuous little neutrino! Couple that with not finding the Higgs Boson and -- after only a year and still at only half power -- the LHC appears to be giving more than its money's worth, just not quite in the way expected ...


----------



## Abernovo (Sep 22, 2011)

It's probably as the team at CERN said, an information error, but if not, it would mean new text books all round. Not to mention possibilities for the SF field.



AnyaKimlin said:


> It has been an interesting week scientifically - there has also been a new species of sparrow found.  (my son is bird obsessed).



The Italian Sparrow. It's been known about for years but there was always the argument over whether or not it was truly a different species. Thankfully, that's now been proven by DNA analysis. Sorry, my working life began in bird conservation. I get a bit geeky.


----------



## AnyaKimlin (Sep 22, 2011)

Abernovo said:


> The Italian Sparrow. It's been known about for years but there was always the argument over whether or not it was truly a different species. Thankfully, that's now been proven by DNA analysis. Sorry, my working life began in bird conservation. I get a bit geeky.



LOL I am going that way courtesy of a early five year old with a speech delay.  We had a breakthrough when he started being bird obsessed and he started to learn their names.  He wants to work in bird conservation when he is big - so he is starting by feeding them, and making sure we keep feeders clean etc  

I've had to read the name of every bird in the Collins Birdbook every night before he goes to bed for about six months now.


----------



## jojajihisc (Sep 23, 2011)

Hot topic on the forums. 60 nanoseconds is just such a small amount of time it does seem like it could easily be a mistake. Another related article.

Dimension-hop may allow neutrinos to cheat light speed.


----------



## The Ace (Sep 23, 2011)

60 nanoseconds ?  That's only slightly longer than it takes for the car behind you to start beeping when the lights change.


----------



## Metryq (Sep 24, 2011)

The Ace said:


> 60 nanoseconds ?  That's only slightly longer than it takes for the car behind you to start beeping when the lights change.



That's because the driver behind you sees by neutrinos, and thus sees the signal change before those slow-moving photons reach your eyes.


----------



## RJM Corbet (Sep 24, 2011)

jojajihisc said:


> Hot topic on the forums. 60 nanoseconds is just such a small amount of time it does seem like it could easily be a mistake. Another related article.
> 
> Dimension-hop may allow neutrinos to cheat light speed.



It's still 7 340 meters/sec faster than light.

A 'neutrino year' would be 231 475 000 kilometers further than a light year.

The dimension thing looks good though, if the finding is correct. It has already been carefully checked for years by people who know pretty much what they're doing ...?


----------



## jojajihisc (Sep 24, 2011)

No doubt it's fast (only a few orders of magnitude faster and inter-stellar travel becomes a reality ), my only point is that incredibly fast speeds measured over relatively tiny distances, making the differences in elapsed time extremely small, could easily be done incorrectly. But I'm hoping for the dimensional hop theory myself.


----------



## Metryq (Sep 24, 2011)

jojajihisc said:


> But I'm hoping for the dimensional hop theory myself.



_A priori_. Now there's proper science.


----------



## PTeppic (Sep 24, 2011)

The Ace said:


> 60 nanoseconds ?  That's only slightly longer than it takes for the car behind you to start beeping when the lights change.



Except New York, where the taxi drivers have been using neutrino time for starting their honk for decades...


----------



## Vertigo (Sep 24, 2011)

It is a very exciting announcement though the difference is not exactly going to see a tour of the galaxy taking a mere year or two. However (sadly) I think it far, far more likely that it will eventually turn out to be a systemic error that they have missed, as they themselves suspect. 

Remember it is not a direct comparison with the speed of light as they can't actually mearsure light travelling the same path (due to rather a lot of rock in the way). So, for example, how was the exact distance between the two points established and how many alterntive methods of establishing that distance were used. I'm not saying that is the problem but there are countless things like that involved in this sort of experiment and it is easy to miss some.


----------



## RJM Corbet (Sep 24, 2011)

Richard Feynman's 'sum of all possibilities' means that a single photon of light takes all possible paths, to arrive at the detector at exactly the same time, but in fact averages out having chosen the shortest route. It's a graph with time running vertically and distance horizontally. Simplified, the photon travels in all possible curves to reach the fixed detector in a straight line, so the vertical destination is the same regardless of the horizontal movement. So light speed is the average of all the speeds at which the photon of light that we detect has actually traveled. It's Schrodinger's cat. It's everywhere, until you look at it. 

A positron, or anti-electron, is an electron with the sign reversed, including the time sign, so anti matter can be expressed in the mathematics (I believe) one way as matter moving backwards in time. At electron level, time is a very malleable thing.

Also, light-speed is measured _in vacuo._

It travels slower through air or water or glass, and not at all through a brick wall. But neutrinos aren't slowed by anything.

Perhaps some very small percentage of neutrinos are refracted somehow to travel _ex vacuo_ through these extra dimensions proposed by string theory, and an even smaller percentage re-emerge?

We'll see ...


----------



## Vertigo (Sep 25, 2011)

Indeed... interesting times. I suspect there are a lot of physicists in a bit of a tizzy right about now


----------



## Metryq (Sep 25, 2011)

"No, I better not look. I just _might_ be in there." (@4:40)


----------



## Metryq (Oct 17, 2011)

*It’s all relative: superluminal neutrino discovery explained*


----------



## Parson (Oct 17, 2011)

Could the error be this simple? Surely the original team would have thought of this. When you deal with a time span of 70 nano seconds you have to take in everything. But I would note that the answer is close but that there is still a discrepancy.


----------



## mosaix (Oct 17, 2011)

Parson said:


> Could the error be this simple? Surely the original team would have thought of this. When you deal with a time span of 70 nano seconds you have to take in everything. But I would note that the answer is close but that there is still a discrepancy.



According to _*New Scientist*_ (1st October, page 6) the original team aren't exactly certain when the neutrinos leave CERN and this could cause an error of up to 5ns. Nor are they entirely certain of the exact direct-line distance between the 'transmitter' and 'receiver'. However they think they have calculated the distance to within 20 centimetres, but this could only account for an error of 0.67ns.

Some things the team had to consider before publishing their results:


Curvature of the Earth
Tidal effects of the Moon
General Relativistic effects of having the two clocks (CERN and Gran Sasso) at different heights (The clock closer to the Earth runs fractionally slower.)
In 2007 the MINOS neutrino detector at Fermilab in Illinois searched for faster-than-light neutrinos but '_didn't find anything statistically significant'_.


----------



## RJM Corbet (Dec 28, 2011)

Does anyone have any up to date stuff on these sneaky little boogers?


----------



## Abernovo (Dec 28, 2011)

The last I heard was that a repeat of the experiment (early December 2011) had yielded the same results and the experiment is now going to be carried out in other facilities, although offhand I can't remember where exactly. I think one site was in the US.

The data has also been farmed out to be peer-reviewed, I believe.


----------



## RJM Corbet (Dec 28, 2011)

Cool. Thanks Abernovo


----------



## Vertigo (Jan 9, 2012)

I was thinking about this and had a crazy idea. I'm no physicist but...

As I understand it photons (light) are affected by gravity and neutrinos are not. This is why neutrinos can pass through enormous amounts of mass (like whole planets) without being affected and light cannot. This is also why the path of light gets bent by nearby objects.

So maybe neutrinos travelling close to the speed of light and unaffected by gravity can take a "shorter" route than light. So arriving early?


----------



## AMB (Jan 9, 2012)

Faster Travel with Neutrino Coaches
_Adding Mass to your Lightstream_​


----------



## Abernovo (Jan 9, 2012)

Vertigo said:


> I was thinking about this and had a crazy idea. I'm no physicist but...
> 
> As I understand it photons (light) are affected by gravity and neutrinos are not. This is why neutrinos can pass through enormous amounts of mass (like whole planets) without being affected and light cannot. This is also why the path of light gets bent by nearby objects.
> 
> So maybe neutrinos travelling close to the speed of light and unaffected by gravity can take a "shorter" route than light. So arriving early?


Likewise, I'm no physicist, but I had a similar thought. There are neutrino counters/registers (I'm not sure of the correct nomenclature) located in a mine in (I think) Wales. The project involved is trying to record neutrino bombardment from space.

So, my uninformed question is whether or not there is some sort of marker in regards to these 'Swiss' neutrinos, which I doubt very much, although it is an amusing thought imagining a graphic artist looking for a brush small enough. Is the experiment contaminated? As with your question Vertigo, I suppose it comes down to whether or not they can contain the neutrinos in the beam and whether they can shut everything else out.


----------



## LadyLara (Jan 9, 2012)

Vertigo said:


> I was thinking about this and had a crazy idea. I'm no physicist but...
> 
> As I understand it photons (light) are affected by gravity and neutrinos are not. This is why neutrinos can pass through enormous amounts of mass (like whole planets) without being affected and light cannot. This is also why the path of light gets bent by nearby objects.
> 
> So maybe neutrinos travelling close to the speed of light and unaffected by gravity can take a "shorter" route than light. So arriving early?


 
I must say I've not heard it said that neutrinos are not affected by gravity before. I'd find it very bizarre if that were true as surely that would make it pretty much unique in the universe and one would have thought such a fact would have been mentioned more often.


----------



## Foxbat (Jan 10, 2012)

It could be because they are electrically neutral (hence the name) and will not interact easily with other subatomic particles (allowing them to penetrate matter much more deeply). 

Also, it's worth keeping in mind that, not only relatively immune to the electromagnetic force, gravity is extremely weak on a sub-atomic level and neutrinos have almost no mass.


----------



## Vertigo (Jan 10, 2012)

Ah my apologies on re-reading I missed a comma . This from Wiki:


> Neutrinos do not carry electric charge, which means that they are not affected by the electromagnetic forces that act on charged particles such as electrons and protons. Neutrinos are affected only by the weak sub-atomic force, of much shorter range than electromagnetism, and gravity, which is relatively weak on the subatomic scale, and are therefore able to travel great distances through matter without being affected by it.


I had read it as : "... affected only by the weak sub-atomic force, of much shorter range than electromagnetism and gravity, ..."

Wherease I now think it reads: "...affected only by the weak sub-atomic force, ..., and gravity, ..."

Although it does go on to say that the gravity is "relatively weak on the subatomic scale", I still think that blows my idea out of the water. Oh well.


----------



## LadyLara (Jan 10, 2012)

That just means that it is weak in comparison to the strong and weak nuclear forces (which only work on that scale), but it doesn't mean it's any weaker on a subatomic scale than it is on a large scale  Don't forget that photons don't have any mass at all but are still affected by gravity. The mass of the particle itself doesn't really come into it.


----------



## Vertigo (Jan 10, 2012)

Yeah I know that's why I said it still blows my idea out of the water . Incidentally the mass of photons is a little more ambiguous than that; I believe photons do "develop" a nonzero effective rest mass when inside a superconductor. Also I believe it has still never been proven experimentally that photons are massless, only that they have a mass less than some number (that get progressively smaller as the experiments become more sophisticated). Nit picking I know but...


----------



## andyw1691 (Feb 11, 2012)

Things get interesting if you take the view that gravity is simply the curviture of spacetime. The paths of photons appear to follow the curviture of spacetime which gives us the gravitational lensing effect.

If neutrinos don't hold to spacetime curviture than when travelling then that would be very interesting 

Andy


----------



## andyw1691 (Feb 11, 2012)

Removed duplicate post.


----------



## RJM Corbet (Mar 9, 2012)

What's the news on this?


----------



## Abernovo (Mar 9, 2012)

I haven't really been following closely, partly because there seems to be little real news.

Repeats of the original experiment are still in the process of being carried out at CERN and other institutes. However, I saw on the news about three weeks ago that there is now a belief that a setting at the LHC* may have been slightly off, so the initial measurements may be invalid.

Basically, it seems to be a case of 'watch this space'.

*The report was pretty vague - a token mention of science before covering who's sleeping with whom in Hollywood. I might go and check Science Daily and see if there's anything there.


----------



## RJM Corbet (Mar 9, 2012)

Abernovo said:


> ... Basically, it seems to be a case of 'watch this space'


 
Yah, also talk of a faulty fiber optic cable connection. Einstein can stop turning in his grave?

Pity. Would have been fun ...


----------



## Abernovo (Mar 9, 2012)

Einstein turning in his grave? I don't know. Everything I've read of him suggests he'd be sitting back grinning at the prospect of a new horizon opening up. Not to mention getting stuck into a good debate.

As to 'faulty fibre-optic  cable connection', I think I heard a similar excuse when somebody forgot to set the VCR (yes, VCR, it was a few years ago).


----------



## mosaix (Mar 16, 2012)

Repeat experiment clock neutrinos at *precisely* the speed of light. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17364682


----------



## Ursa major (Mar 16, 2012)

From that story:





> Since their November result, the Icarus team have adjusted their experiment to do a speed measurement.
> 
> What was missing was information from Cern about the departure time of the neutrinos, which the team recently received to complete their analysis.


 
which makes the following somewhat of an understatement:


> "I think they were a little bit in a hurry to publish something that was astonishing, and at the end of the day it was a wrong measurement."


----------



## mosaix (Mar 16, 2012)

Yes, I noticed that, UM which rather conflicts with earlier accounts which, if I remember correctly, reported them checking their results again and again before going public.


----------



## Vertigo (Mar 16, 2012)

Ah well, only to be expected I suppose; we're still stuck with that annoying speed limit!

Oh and Ursa the first quote you listed was refering to the second experiment not the first. The first experiement was carried out by the Opera group and was the one giving FTL neutrinos. The 'second' experiement was carried out by the Icarus team and was not directly aimed at testing the neutrino speed. But by adding in the departure timings from Cern they were able to use the data they had collected to make the speed calculations. This is what the quote was referring to.


----------



## mosaix (Mar 16, 2012)

Vertigo said:


> Ah well, only to be expected I suppose; we're still stuck with that annoying speed limit!



Yes, Vertigo and no time travel either.


----------



## Vertigo (Mar 16, 2012)

mutter, grumble, mumble - have to go and rewrite that masterpiece now...


----------



## Ursa major (Mar 16, 2012)

Oops! Sorry about that. 


It's just that I seem to recall, at the time of the earlier announcement, various issues about the timing of the departure of neutrinos from CERN and read the text in that context. (I must be in WiP-editing mode. )


----------



## Vertigo (Mar 16, 2012)

I must admit I had to go through the article twice to get it straight in my mind which bits referred to which.


----------



## mosaix (Apr 2, 2012)

Slightly old news, but the head of the 'Opera' team that reported the original results has now resigned.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17560379


----------



## Ursa major (Apr 2, 2012)

That'll be because of the chorus of disapproval, I expect....


----------



## Vertigo (Apr 2, 2012)

Arrrgh Ursa!

Actually I think it is a little harsh that he felt obliged to do so. In all fairness when they made the original announcement I recall that they made it very clear they considered their result unlikely in the extreme and were looking for help in discovering their probable error.


----------



## mosaix (Apr 2, 2012)

Vertigo said:


> Actually I think it is a little harsh that he felt obliged to do so.



I agree. People should be allowed to learn from their mistakes. He's probably a better scientist as a result of what happened.

It's not as if any real harm was done.


----------



## Vertigo (Apr 2, 2012)

That said I notice the article says (very carefully - 'reports said') that some of his team may have wanted him to resign. And that is starting to smack a little of internal politics. Unless, possibly, he had been the one to insist on publishing early and the rest of the team had been pushing for more time to check their results.


----------

