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Permalink Reply by Tomaž Fekonja on September 23, 2011 at 2:49pm

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/09/this_extraordinary_...

 

Read also this, you know media always tryes to make it look bigger then it actualy is :) Well, its big anyway, but maybe not that...

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Permalink Reply by Marko Bilić on September 23, 2011 at 3:35pm

I said IF it turns out correct.

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Permalink Reply by Sky Axle on September 23, 2011 at 5:42pm

Luckily science is always expecting to be wrong. Short of us disproving 1+1 = 2 physics can only be so rocked by new data. Still it's interesting. Neutrinos having zero mass don't *really* surprise me much exceeding light speed at some point, but it's very interesting. I'm less interested in how this changes text books and more so in what applications they will try to find for it.

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Permalink Reply by Sky Axle on September 23, 2011 at 7:48pm

On second thought, it might mean more than I am making it out to. This is my favorite quote from blogs.discovermagazine.com on the matter

"But is it true?

Now first off, if it were this would overturn so much physics that they may as well have discovered that gravity pushes, not pulls. So right away we need to treat this claim with lots and lots of skepticism. I’ll note these are actual particle physicists making this claim, and not some crackpots who will shake their fists at the sky and say how Galileo was laughed at too. "

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Permalink Reply by Sky Axle on September 23, 2011 at 11:42pm

Some humor to add to the point.
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/neutrinos.png

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Permalink Reply by The Shiznit on September 23, 2011 at 7:20pm

I was hoping that somebody would link this up.  Thanks Marko.  :-) 

Recent Chat Dialogue: 
{This will be funnier if you understand that a few of our members consider Jarod to be kind-of like our resident physics expert.  hehe}

Jarod Phillip Benowitz:  God damnit!  I started learning about Special Relativity in Physics II, and now it may all be wrong.  srsly. 
Jarod Phillip Benowitz:  Fuck you universe!
The Shiznit:  LOL - the CERN discovery, Jarod?
Jarod Phillip Benowitz:  yup
The Shiznit:  Shifty & I were laughing about that yesterday.
The Shiznit:  About How it's funny that scientists are constantly coming up with new discoveries that prove everything they preached as truth for so many years was actually wrong.  :-)
Jarod Phillip Benowitz:  Religion does it, too.
The Shiznit:  Yep.  That was the analogy that I used with Shifty.  heh
The Shiznit:  ...that science is like a religion sometimes; except that its "preachers" wear lab coats.  lul
The Shiznit:  The attitude of many scientists is very much the same though, really.  Very dogmatic.
Jarod Phillip Benowitz:  some ya
The Shiznit:  Their attitude is like: "This is the way it is, and if you don't believe.. then you're an ignorant fool, not worthy of..."
The Shiznit:  when what they "believe" to be true, many times is simply theoretical.  :-)

{pause in chat}
The Shiznit:  Hey Jarod... do you think that this will prove that Athene's Theory was right?  lol  :-D

{Longer pause... with no response... but Jarod is quietly thinking: "Fuck you Shiz!" }  lmao  XD

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Permalink Reply by Marcel R on September 24, 2011 at 2:02am

Well, to say that a whole century of physics is going 'down to the shitter' is a rather exaggerated claim.

Are Newton's laws in the shitter? –Nope.

Is Æther theory in the shitter? –Yup.

'Why is that?' Thing is that in physics we use theories that actually work. Newton's laws are used daily, they just can't be used at the atomic level nor at 'relatively' high velocities; at that point, Newton's laws break down, otherwise they work perfectly! (up to some unnoticeable error ofc). Whereas æther theory is just flawled in all the senses and does not predict a thing. (Hence the shitter.)

My point is that physics is a science, and sciences go like that (one should notice the difference between sciences and mathematics, since the latter is not 'directly' related with reality, i.e. you don't need to falsify/verify [Popper/Kuhn] it versus nature, but rather with conceptual –logic– structure(s). That's the good thing about math, one does not have pressure to 'believe in' the structures that you're studying). Now, if one were to find that Einstein's postulates were wrong in some special cases (like the hypothetical case that neutrinos do travel faster than light [more about this later]), theoretical physicists would work their ass off as to include new ideas for 'fixing' the theory. For example, they could define different types of 'masses' for different force fields. And everything would be okay. We would just have more knowledge on reality, and Einstein's formulae would still work. I mean, they work now! They're not just going to stop working because 'we' found out about this difference in speed. 'We' don't have anything to do on what is and what is not the case in nature. 'We' just observe.

Okay, that was the first thing I wanted to say. Now, about the experiment. This was already 'observed' in Fermilab in 2007. However, their range error was bigger than the difference of speed, so they decided not to conclude anything about that. 3 years later, in CERN, they started to check whether or not neutrinos do 'oscillate' (wiki) –like Fermilab did in 2005 without much success–. The experiment ended up with a paper claiming to have observed a muon-tau oscillation, meaning that neutrinos *are* a non-zero mass particle. And even if neutrinos had mass (contrary to the SM), that wouldn't be too much of a problem: we would 'just' have to re-adjust parameters when it comes to use perturbative theory in weak-force fields; and if that doesn't work, we still have S-duality with strong-force fields. Right now, it is pretty much obvious that neutrinos have mass, but more data about this will be provided in future experiments. Anyway, one year later, CERN is releasing this paper (not sure if you have read it) announcing the possibility that neutrinos are faster than the speed of light. If you have a graduate-level of physics, you can even check the paper yourself. Whilst I was checking it, I noticed that the delta_T in time of flight difference (between C in vacua, and muons through Earth crust) is about 1048 nano-seconds (speed ≈ 300,006km/s to the 299,792km/s of light). And yet, adjustments on page 15 add up to about 987 nano-seconds! This means that the error range is less than 100 nano-seconds of the actual difference between a photon and a neutrino. We also have to consider that the measurements used (I am not quite familiar with experimental particle physics though) are not the 'orthodox' ones to use in these situations. They clearly state: "...It is worth stressing that this measurement does not rely on the difference between a start (t0) and a stop signal but on the comparison of two event time distributions...." As far as I know, they use some kind of GPS-measurement method, using satellites. This complicates things, which may add even more error to the forementioned range of error.

Either way, we cannot yet be speculative about this subject. We have to keep in mind that this experiment have been produced thousands of times in the last years, they know what are they doing... to some extent. Still though, more –accurate– data is needed before claiming anything. And even if it turned out to be that neutrinos *actually* have mass and they go faster than light... don't worry! theoretical physicists will make sure to fix it and introduce new equations so that everything holds. We just have to keep an open mind to what is the case.

tl;dr: All is well.

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Permalink Reply by Sky Axle on September 24, 2011 at 2:49am

I do love the precision of their equipment. That is the most impressive aspect to me. I honestly didn't know we had position technology that finely tuned until I looked deeper into these atom smashers.

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Permalink Reply by Marko Bilić on September 24, 2011 at 1:14pm

thanks for the detailed answer man, I'm not a physicist and I was hoping to get responses like this :)

 

And shiz, that was on point about science :D

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Permalink Reply by Marcel R on September 24, 2011 at 2:54pm

No problem ;) Glad I was of some help.

 

@Sky Axle, you're totally right, the used equipment by Opera is impressive in all the senses. However! I have today read some articles by astronomers and *they* all mention that the Supernova_1987A gives a much tighter bound to the behaviour of neutrinos and hence there must be some errors for sure. Noting that a supernova actually uses an irreproducible energy (at least by now, we humans) and it was very far away; the 'observations' of that supernova were like observing a SUPER-DUPER-CERN. And the results back then were that neutrinos were no faster than light. So there's still a lot of scepticism (a lot!), and nobody can't yet talk of discoveries but just 'interesting results that one must check in the following decade'.

Also, I liked how the paper published by CERN ends by saying that they have no intentions to start theoretical work about this result lol.

Nice thread.

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Permalink Reply by Marcel R on September 24, 2011 at 5:10pm

Another nice explanation one should stress to mention is the possibility of quantum tunneling for part of neutrinos during their travel (which is not as fancy as it sounds! for it happens every day in all technological devices, and it is the most important source for the stars to bright! –i.e. no violation of relativity!).

So in a sense, I would say that our ignorance lies more on the behaviour of neutrinos and their relation to the 'Standard Model' (which should be revised one of these days, since the 'Standard Model' is like a box of ideas that theoretical physicists fill and clean every once in a while), rather than in Relativity Theory (for relativity works really well!). Maybe the 'key' to why(!) how neutrinos oscillate is their speed and way of propagation. We still have much more to learn ;)

Nowadays, what worries me the most, is not the speed of neutrinos, but rather how media talks about physics! It is really frustrating to listen to such a sensationalist claims... I still laugh when I remember the time that media used the words 'blackhole', 'humanity' and 'CERN' in the same sentence. Lol, good times.

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Permalink Reply by Lil Van on September 25, 2011 at 1:33am

Im very sceptical about this claim, i heard somthing about that CERN didn't correct the data they recieved (when usually scientiest correct data, somthing about that there is a small point of time between the mesures and the recieve) maybe that's why theysome how got it that the particle moved faster than the speed of light.

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