Roll over, Einstein?

 

The physics world is abuzz with news that a group of European physicists plans to announce Friday that it has clocked a burst of subatomic particles known as neutrinos breaking the cosmic speed limit — the speed of light — that was set by Albert Einstein in 1905.

 

If true, it is a result that would change the world. But that “if” is enormous.

 

Even before the European physicists had presented their results — in a paper that appeared on the physics Web site arXiv.org on Thursday night and in a seminar at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, on Friday — a chorus of physicists had risen up on blogs and elsewhere arguing that it was way too soon to give up on Einstein and that there was probably some experimental error. Incredible claims require incredible evidence.

 

“These guys have done their level best, but before throwing Einstein on the bonfire, you would like to see an independent experiment,” said John Ellis, a CERN theorist who has published work on the speeds of the ghostly particles known as neutrinos.

 

According to scientists familiar with the paper, the neutrinos raced from a particle accelerator at CERN outside Geneva, where they were created, to a cavern underneath Gran Sasso in Italy, a distance of about 450 miles, about 60 nanoseconds faster than it would take a light beam. That amounts to a speed greater than light by about 0.0025 percent (2.5 parts in a hundred thousand).

 

Even this small deviation would open up the possibility of time travel and play havoc with longstanding notions of cause and effect. Einstein himself — the author of modern physics, whose theory of relativity established the speed of light as the ultimate limit — said that if you could send a message faster than light, “You could send a telegram to the past.”

 

Alvaro de Rujula, a theorist at CERN, called the claim “flabbergasting.”

 

“If it is true, then we truly haven’t understood anything about anything,” he said, adding: “It looks too big to be true. The correct attitude is to ask oneself what went wrong.”

 

The group that is reporting the results is known as Opera, for Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus. Antonio Ereditato, the physicist at the University of Bern who leads the group, agreed with Dr. de Rujula and others who expressed shock. He told the BBC that Opera — after much internal discussion — had decided to put its results out there in order to get them scrutinized.

 

“My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing,” Dr. Ereditato told the BBC. “Then I would be relieved.”

 

Neutrinos are among the weirdest denizens of the weird quantum subatomic world. Once thought to be massless and to travel at the speed of light, they can sail through walls and planets like wind through a screen door. Moreover, they come in three varieties and can morph from one form to another as they travel along, an effect that the Opera experiment was designed to detect by comparing 10-microsecond pulses of protons on one end with pulses of neutrinos at the other. Dr. de Rujula pointed out, however, that it was impossible to identify which protons gave birth to which neutrino, leading to statistical uncertainties.

 

Dr. Ellis noted that a similar experiment was reported by a collaboration known as Minos in 2007 on neutrinos created at Fermilab in Illinois and beamed through the Earth to the Soudan Mine in Minnesota. That group found, although with less precision, that the neutrino speeds were consistent with the speed of light.

 

Measurements of neutrinos emitted from a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud in 1987, moreover, suggested that their speeds differed from light by less than one part in a billion.

 

John Learned, a neutrino astronomer at the University of Hawaii, said that if the results of the Opera researchers turned out to be true, it could be the first hint that neutrinos can take a shortcut through space, through extra dimensions. Joe Lykken of Fermilab said, “Special relativity only holds in flat space, so if there is a warped fifth dimension, it is possible that on other slices of it, the speed of light is different.”

 

But it is too soon for such mind-bending speculation. The Opera results will generate a rush of experiments aimed at confirming or repudiating it, according to Dr. Learned. “This is revolutionary and will require convincing replication,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/science/23speed.html

 

To people who don't realise what this means, it disproves one of Einstein's most fundamental laws of Physics. It also, by the current laws of quantum physics, means that time travel is possible.

In other words, I think I just had a nerdgasm.

Interesting! :o

faster than Coldplay tickets? That's impossible.

:lol:

and neutrinos go flying at the speed of light, to show you how it all began

neutrinos go flying from the underground particle accelerator, if you could see it then you'd understand :P

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZEnBX9BJ4M]Speed of light broken? - YouTube[/ame]

Faster-than-light neutrinos could be down to bad wiring

 

What might have been the biggest physics story of the past century may instead be down to a faulty connection.

 

In September 2011, the Opera experiment reported it had seen particles called neutrinos evidently travelling faster than the speed of light.

 

The team has now found two problems that may have affected their test in opposing ways: one in its timing gear and one in an optical fibre connection.

 

More tests from May will determine just how they affect measured speeds.

 

The Opera collaboration (an acronym for Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Racking Apparatus) was initially started to study the tiny particles as they travelled through 730km of rock between a particle accelerator at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) in Switzerland and the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy.

 

Its goal was to quantify how often the neutrinos change from one type to another on the journey.

 

But during the course of the experiments the team found that the neutrinos showed up 60 billionths of a second faster than light would have done over the same distance - a result that runs counter to a century's worth of theoretical and experimental physics.

 

The team submitted the surprising result to the scientific community in an effort to confirm or refute it, and several other experiments around the world are currently working to replicate the result.

 

A repeat of the experiment by the Opera team will now address whether the issues they have found affect the ultimate neutrino speed they measure.

 

Faulty connection?

 

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.

 

That problem would increase the measured time of the neutrinos' flight, in turn reducing the surprising faster-than-light effect.

 

But the team also said they found a problem in the optical fibre connection between the GPS signal and the experiment's main clock - quite simply, a cable not quite fully plugged in.

 

In contrast, the team said that effect would increase the neutrinos' apparent speed.

 

The team had carried out their measurements for more than three years, exhaustively scrutinising their methods and analysis before announcing the results last year - so why had they not found these issues before?

 

"It's sometimes very difficult to tell whether this thing could have been done before - because in a sense the answer is always yes," said Sergio Bertolucci, director of research at Cern.

 

Prof Bertolucci outlined the complexity both of the experiment and the analysis of the results, stressing that the hunt for just these kinds of problems had been relentless.

 

"One has to realise that the collaboration has never stopped to try to 'kill' the measurement (proving that it was erroneous)," he told BBC News.

 

"Their constant search for systematic (errors) has never stopped, for more than a year."

 

Given that the opposing effects only seem to muddy the waters further on whether neutrinos can exceed the "universal speed limit", only more experiments will put the matter to rest.

 

For its part, the Opera team said in a statement: "While continuing our investigations, in order to unambiguously quantify the effect on the observed result, the collaboration is looking forward to performing a new measurement of the neutrino velocity as soon as a new bunched beam will be available in 2012."

 

Facilities also at Gran Sasso called Borexino, LVD and Icarus will also take part, along with Minos, based at Fermilab in the US, and possibly a Japanese facility called T2K.

 

With so much at stake, Oxford University particle physicist and Minos spokesman Alfons Weber said these international efforts will go ahead no matter what.

 

"I can say that Minos will quite definitely go ahead," Dr Weber told BBC News. "We've already installed most of the equipment we need to make an accurate measurement.

 

"Even if Opera now publish that 'Yes, everything is fine', we still want to make sure that we come up with a consistent, independent measurement, and I assume that the other experiments will go forward with this as well."

 

But Prof Bertolucci at Cern says that there are wider implications of the neutrino story, which is playing out in the public eye.

 

"All this story has shown to the wider public how science works," he said.

 

"Of course the people of Opera are not happy; they would have preferred that the neutrinos stayed [faster than light], but the fact that they came out and they put themselves to the scrutiny of the wider collaboration... I think makes a good case for science."

 

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If the Neutrinos actually did travel faster than light, and Einstien's theory is still correct, this should mean that the Neutrinos may have somehow gone back in time? According to him, time goes slower as we approach the speed of light, so theoretically, if you go faster than light, you effectively reverse time! But then again, it's a theory.