Neutrino Faster Than Light … Maybe. Revising Relativity?
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Albert Einstein. AP Photo
Did Einstein get something wrong?
His theory of relativity — which has proved remarkably durable since he first proposed it in 1905 — said that the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) had to be something of a cosmic speed limit. But now a team of scientists at CERN, the giant particle accelerator physicists use in the Alps on the French-Swiss border, say they have conducted an experiment in which neutrinos — subatomic particles with no electric charge — traveled slightly faster than photons, the particles that make up light beams.
If they’re right, it’s a big deal in the physics world — but that’s a big if.
“The feeling that most people have is this can’t be right, this can’t be real,” said James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN. Physicists will now be poring over the report of the experiment, many of them saying they’re fascinated by the findings, but also inclined to be skeptical. (If you’re into such things, the abstract of the experiment is HERE.)
“We’d be thrilled if it’s right because we love something that shakes the foundation of what we believe,” said Columbia University physicist Brian Greene. “That’s what we live for.”
Other accelerators, particularly Fermilab outside Chicago, will be pressed into service to see if they can be made to replicate — or refute — the European results.
The neutrino was only proposed in 1930 as a mathematical construct to explain the behavior of other subatomic particles. Scientists say vast numbers of them (probably traveling at the speed of light) harmlessly pass through matter — including your body — all the time. Vast detectors, usually giant containers of pure water deep in underground mines, were set up to try to detect neutrinos. They were finally spotted in 1956. Not until the last decade was anyone even able to demonstrate that they have mass.
And now they’ve traveled faster than light? Scientists say it does not change our lives in any direct way — at least not yet — but they say it does stretch the mind.
(The Associated Press contributed to this story.)
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Wow. Cool stuff!
Posted by: Jim | September 23, 2011, 11:08 am 11:08 am
And thus was born time travel, which destroyed everything.
Posted by: the future | September 23, 2011, 12:16 pm 12:16 pm
And thus was born time travel, which destroyed everything.———————Didn’t destroy much for me as I haven’t been inflexibly pining to define reality the way most folks tend to do . The main metric for science ( mathematics ) is an ever-evolving field and because of that ever ongoing evolution it can bring a false certainty into an equation quite easily (i.e. false max speed of light possibly ) and not only that , it is a man-made construct that just might not be the best way to try to define certain aspects of reality as well. Numbers do a great job of describing some things , but at the quantum level 1+1= ?… and all that fine number theory goes +poof+ .
Posted by: MeltonDavis | September 23, 2011, 2:37 pm 2:37 pm
About time they started catching up to me!! I’ve said for quite some time that the speed of light isn’t the speed limit because light itself is within the universe. Outside the universe – and on its “edge” – information travels considerably faster. E=MC2 is a good approximation, just change the C to the speed of the fabric of existence in the current locality and I think the equation will be completely satisfied to the fullest extent we can test (at least as of now). I discovered the obvious nature of the flaw when examining my own Automatic Realization of [Existential] Potential as the CAUSE of existence and how that then moves forward so that we come from the resulting largely-random pool of fundamental energy.
Posted by: looncraz | September 23, 2011, 3:21 pm 3:21 pm
A law is something proven that is irrefutable. A theory is something that cannot be 100% proven. Relativity, and even gravity, are theories. An example of a law would be inertia. The phrasing is very important here.
Posted by: Faith | September 23, 2011, 4:48 pm 4:48 pm
Interesting! It appears the particle hit the time earlier in a complex system rotated relative to the Cartesian. Both theories are valid. The experiment prove Democritus void theory.
Posted by: Mike | September 23, 2011, 8:41 pm 8:41 pm
I’m waiting for the first pizza joint to come up with their special, “A 16″ Cern Collider with tachyons, neutrinos and photons, hold the anchovies”
Posted by: nythawk | September 23, 2011, 8:55 pm 8:55 pm
Can’t be true. Neutrinos and antineutrinos travel to the earth from distant supernovae (supernovas: exploding stars) and are detected by their interactions with ultra-pure water in detector-containing tanks in old mines deep underground in Japan and North America. When those supernovae are detected VISUALLY (by normal photons) by telescopes and the neutrino detectors recorders are checked, the times match up perfectly. That time match has been used to prove the neutrinos came, indeed, from each supernova. It also proves -especially since the distance is usually millions of light years- that the speed of photons and neutrinos are exactly the same.
Posted by: The_Mick | September 23, 2011, 10:15 pm 10:15 pm
Why do people assume this opens the door for time travel? If you travel faster than light and leave on a solar flare, you’d get to earth immediately and wait a few minutes to see the flare. You wouldn’t arrive yesterday. That’s like saying that because we can move at supersonic speeds we can hear stuff that happens tomorrow, or say stuff to yesterday
Posted by: Atrini | September 24, 2011, 3:10 pm 3:10 pm
This only shows that it was incorrect to link the speed of light with time. As our concept of time is actually a measurememt of the Earth’s rotation and orbit around the Sun, it was always fundamentally flawed to link our representation of that with how fast you can travel in a given direction, just like how we used to use sundials to record time, using a torch to move the shadow does not mean we are moving backwards and forwards in time. It will not affect any laws of Velocity or Acceleration.
Posted by: Gary B | September 26, 2011, 5:38 am 5:38 am
Time is relative to space and thus constant in any given space. The fact (if true or not) that any subatomic partical can travel faster that light is irrelavent to anyone ever traveling backward in time. For example, if one were to fold or compress space, one could transverse that space in a shorter period of time however you would not accually be trvealing faster, but rather just a shorter distance to get from point A to point B. You would still be traveling forward in time. Light would just take more time to get there. And although you may be able to look back into the past and see the light waves that left before you, you would not be able to interactwith the past in any other way but to observe it. Lightspeed is a variable according to the space it travels through. This much is proven fact. We can slow down the speed of light by passing it through differtent matter. Even in the “vaccum” of out space (even the space between galaxies is not empty) light travals at variable rates. Time can only travel in one direction [forward] in any space. the only way i see probbable to travel through time, whether it be forward or backward, would be to travel via subspace. Or in other words, outside the “space” of time.
Posted by: Rob | September 26, 2011, 10:13 am 10:13 am
Time is relative to space and thus constant in any given space. The fact (if true or not) that any subatomic partical can travel faster that light is irrelavent to anyone ever traveling backward in time. For example, if one were to fold or compress space, one could transverse that space in a shorter period of time however you would not accually be traveling faster, but rather just a shorter distance to get from point A to point B. You would still be traveling forward in time. Light would just take more time to get there. And although you may be able to look back into the past and see the light waves that left before you, you would not be able to interactwith the past in any other way but to observe it. Lightspeed is a variable according to the space it travels through. This much is proven fact. We can slow down the speed of light by passing it through differtent matter. Even in the vaccum of outer space (even the space between galaxies is not empty) light travals at variable rates. Time can only travel in one direction [forward] in any space. the only way I see probbable to travel through time, whether it be forward or backward, would be to travel via subspace. Or in other words, outside the space of time. To travel backward in time would theoretically mean to undo time itself thus undoing everything that has been done past the point in time one would return to. Everthing, would have to be reversed, or in other words undone. This includes all changes to to molecular and even atomic structure. Even the orbits of electrons around the nuclius of an atom would not yet have happenned. We could not exist in the past as we are in the present but rather only as we existed in the past point in time we would attempt to return to. There for we would either exist as we did in the time we returned to with no memory of the time we lived beyoud that of which we now occupied, or (if the time was prior to our existance) not at all. Thus time would still unfold as it had already done prior to our leaving and we would simply arrive back where we strated from. Traveling forwrd in time however is a whole different thing. If we could exit space, say by entering subspace or true “outer space”, then we could possibly wait for time to progress forward and re-enter space at another point in time. Or as true “outer space” would be void of matter and density light would travel at an eccellerated speed or possably even instantainiously, allowwing us to travel from point A to point B at FTL speed in compared to the light that travelled through space.
Posted by: Rob | September 26, 2011, 11:09 am 11:09 am
I really wonder what these guys measured! Digging up my old physics books, I found that there are actually two ways for measuring the speed of light (or any radiation): Wavefront speed, and phase speed. In vacuum it doesn’t matter, because both are equal. But inside some matter, the two differ. And now comes the interesting point: While wavefront speed inside matter is ALWAYS slower than the vacuum speed of light, phase speed varies as c/n, where c is the vacuum speed of light and n is the refraction index of the material. And n can be LESS THAN ONE, for some materials at short wavelengths! That means that very high frequency waves, for example X-rays, have a phase speed slightly HIGHER than the official speed of light, when going through certain materials! For example, common window glass is such a material. The phase speed of X-rays going through glass is a few parts per million faster than the speed of light! At the same time, the wavefront speed of those same X-rays in that same glass is much slower than the speed of light.
Einstein said that no matter and no energy can travel faster than the official speed of light in vacuum. But is the phase of a wave an energy, or is it matter, or what is it? I would say, neither matter nor energy! So this doesn’t conflict with Einstein’s theory, and still it’s faster than light!
You surely know the duality principle: That many things in physics behave both like a wave and like a particle stream. Light, for example, can be considered an electromagnetic wave, or a stream of photons. I’m VERY uncomfortable with this duality principle, but it’s the best we have at this time.
So, what about neutrinos? A “particle” that has no electric charge, no or almost no mass, but has a spin and some other characteristics, can be detected by the transmutation it causes in certain elements… A strange thing! Is it a particle, really, or is it a wave, or is it both? It clearly has very large penetrating power, going through our planet like nothing! So I have a feeling thaty within our poor understanding of this part of physics, a neutrino stream can also be expressed as some sort of extremely energetic wave. MUCH more energetic than X-rays.
If we consider that many materials, such as glass, have an index of refraction that is much larger than 1 for radio signals and light, around 1 for some ultraviolet wavelengths, very slightly less than 1 for X-rays, and even a bit less than that for gamma rays, then it is entirely logical to assume that such materials can have an index of refraction about 0.0023% less than one for the equivalent frequency of a neutrino! And rocks should be in the same ballpark as glass, and of course they are transparent to neutrinos. So, if the test setup used by CERN is sensitive to the phase speed rather than the wavefront speed of the neutrino stream, we would have an easy explanation for the speed measured. An explanation that was well known as much as 80 to 90 years ago!
Posted by: Dean Moore | September 27, 2011, 11:42 am 11:42 am