Sep 222011
*IF* this pans out… this is the biggest news EVAR.
Scientific breakthrough: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than light
Short form… a beam of neutrinos was sent from Geneva to Gran Sasso, Italy. The light trip-time is 2.3 milliseconds, but the neutrinos were getting there 60 nanoseconds ahead of schedule.
I’d bet good money that this will turn out to have a mundane explanation… timing/sensor issues, that sort of thing. It’s 732 kilometers from Geneva to Gran Sasso; 60 nanoseconds at the speed of light is about 18 meters. But if it’s for real…
5 Responses to “FTL neutrinos detected. Holy crap.”
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Yeah, if they are right, that changes just about everything – like when Quantum Physics hit Newtonian Physics.
I’ll bet they looked at their findings around a hundred different times before daring to publish.
Remember the story about when Einstein was teaching physics and handed out the final exam to his students?:
“Professor, these questions are the same as on the test from last year… aren’t you afraid we’ll just copy the right answers from that test?”
“This year, the questions may be the same, but the answers are different.”
I get such a kick out of watching the development of physics theory over the last hundred years; it’s a ball knowing that we still don’t have a clue about how things _really_ work in detail.
I sure hope they are right about any quantum black holes the LHC whips up decaying in nanoseconds though… because if they and that guy in the wheelchair are wrong…and one of those thing falls through the bottom of the LHC and starts heading towards the Earth’s core…
Years back, someone wrote a book about the top ten things that could make human life go extinct on Earth; pretty high up on that list was a major physics experiment that goes horribly wrong.
If they’re right, it doesn’t really change anything. Now, if they actually solve the String Theory problem, that may change the whole foundations of Physics and Mathematics.
If this is proven to be correct, does it mean that communicating and traveling FTL may someday be a possibility?
Can we build a communication network that uses neutrinos?
> does it mean that communicating and traveling FTL may someday be a possibility?
*Maybe.*
> Can we build a communication network that uses neutrinos?
Not a practical one. You’d need a transmitter the size of the particle accelerator at CERN, and you’d need a receiver nearly as big, and even then the data rate would be *really* low. The power output of the transmitter would be enormous for a tiny, tiny signal picked up at the other end. I suspect that if this same transmitter/detector combo was separated by planetary distances rather than just across a few countries, it might well not have detected *anything*.
Neutrinos are just about the most useless medium for data transmission we could come up with. In order to be of any value at all, the neutrinos would have to go a *lot* faster than c, not just a tiny just-barely-detectable fraction faster.
Once they are certain they can produce nutrinos marginally faster than light. One obvious next experiment would be to look for particles with higher speeds &/or easier detection. In effect CERN has just done the equivalent of the very first experiment in morse-telegraphy. Who would have believed at that point that television was possible…
Note on Einstien, his equations say travel AT lightspeed is impossible they say nothing about faster than light particles.